The Check With Three Names On It

“The check register is in Mom’s desk, in the second drawer,” I said. “Every line is in it, back to the day of her stroke. Groceries, the propane, her prescriptions, the girl who cut her hair. You are welcome to it any day you like. I would be glad for you to read it.”

He looked at the gravel.

“I’m not asking for my twelve hundred back,” I said. “I am not going to ask you for it today or ever. That’s between you and whatever you believe in. But Aunt Lois took hers out of her savings, and she keeps her heat at 64 degrees. She gets every dollar of it back by Friday. I don’t care which of you brings it. If she doesn’t have it Friday, I will pay her myself on Saturday, and then I will tell her why.”

“That’s all I have to say,” I said.

Doug got in his car. He sat a second with both hands on the wheel, and then he backed out and drove off toward the highway without going back in for his coat.

Alan had not said one word the whole time. He was standing by his pickup with his keys in his hand and his chin on his chest. He looked old. He is my big brother and he looked old.

“Renee,” he said.

“Go on home, Alan,” I said. I was not unkind about it. I just had nothing left. “Friday.”

I went back in and took Aunt Lois a second lemon bar. Somebody had hung Doug’s coat on the back of her chair.

Alan knocked on my kitchen door Thursday evening at a quarter past six.

He had driven straight from Deshler. He was carrying a pie plate with a dish towel over it, and nobody leaves Aunt Lois’s apartment without one.

“She made me eat two pieces first,” he said. “After I told her.”

“You told her?”

“All of it.” He set the pie on the counter very carefully. “She cried a little. Then she said she’d known boys who did worse and turned out all right, and she made me sit down.”

I poured him coffee. Jeff stayed at the sink with his back to us, drying the same pan for a good while.

Alan told it plainly. I will give it to you the way he gave it to me.

The plant had cut his shift in August. He was two payments behind on his pickup and had a letter from the bank about it. The week Mom died, he told Doug he did not know how he was going to afford the gas to keep driving down, let alone time off without pay.

Doug said he would figure something out.

What Doug figured was this. Mom’s prepaid plan covered the funeral home, start to finish. What it did not cover came to $485: two hundred for Pastor Wayne, one hundred for the organist, and $185 for the spray of mums on the casket. Doug put that on his card.

Then he wrote up a bill for $3,600 and sent a third of it to me. And he called Aunt Lois and told her the family was short.

That brought in $2,400. The $485 came off the top. Alan got $1,000, which caught up his truck. Doug kept the other $915 for his motel and his gas and the four days he had missed at work, since he is paid on commission.