The Check With Three Names On It

“He said you’d had the house and Mom’s check to live on for two years,” Alan said. “He said it all came out even in the end. He said nobody would ever look at what a church lunch costs.”

“Did you believe that?”

Alan turned his cup around on the table.

“I wanted to,” he said. “I didn’t ask him a single question, Renee. I took the thousand and I paid the bank and I didn’t ask. That’s the truth of it. I knew it smelled wrong and I held my nose.”

“And Sunday?”

“Sunday that old man thanked me by name in front of the people who fed me after Dad’s funeral.” His eyes were wet. “I couldn’t light her candle. I’d have dropped it.”

He reached into his jacket and laid two envelopes on my table.

He had sold his bass boat. Boat, motor and trailer, to a fellow in Hastings, for $2,900 cash on Tuesday night. Twelve hundred of it had gone to Aunt Lois that afternoon, all of it, not just his part. And there was a thousand in the envelope in front of me.

“That’s what I took,” he said. “It’s yours. I know it’s two hundred short of what you sent him. I’ll get it.”

I looked at that envelope a long time.

I am a church woman and I had half a mind to push it back across the table and tell him to keep it. But I thought about Jeff in his sweater. I thought about how a thing is not put right until it is actually put right.

I took it.

“The two hundred is Doug’s to bring,” I said. “Not yours.”

Alan nodded. Then he put his face in his hands, a grown man of 50 at my kitchen table, and Jeff finally set down that pan and came over and put a hand on the back of his neck. Neither of them said anything. Men have a way of doing that.

When Alan could talk again he asked me what else he could do.

“There’s a funeral at St. Mark’s on Saturday,” I said. “Mrs. Thornton will be down there by seven. Those roasters weigh a ton when they’re full.”

He was there at a quarter to. Mrs. Thornton told me later that she handed him a dish towel and did not let him sit down until two in the afternoon.

He has come back about one Saturday a month ever since, an hour each way. The women call him “the new girl.”

Doug was another matter.

We did not hear from him for Thanksgiving. Alan came, and Aunt Lois, and there was an empty chair that everyone was careful not to look at.

At Christmas a card came from Lincoln, signed with his name and his wife’s and nothing else.

I did not call him. I had said what I had to say in that parking lot, and I had left a door open, and a door is all you can leave. You cannot carry a man through it.

Jeff and I bought the new furnace in February with Alan’s thousand and what we could add to it.

Easter was late that year. At St. Mark’s there is a sunrise service at six thirty, and after it a breakfast in the basement that the men cook, which mostly means egg bake and ham and a great deal of standing around holding spatulas. The women run it anyway. I was down there by half past five in my mother’s blue apron, which I had worn at eleven funeral dinners by then, starting coffee in the new urn.