The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

I want to be fair to Rick. He was not thinking about a boat. He was thinking about our father’s hands, and about a man who welded for forty years and died with $6,200 to his name, and he wanted somebody to answer for it. Grief comes out of some men sideways. In Rick it comes out as arithmetic.

“We ought to collect,” he said. “It’s owed. Split it three ways, even. You too, Lynn. That’s better than fair.”

“That pail was left to Lynn,” my husband said.

Jim had been standing at the counter the whole time, drying the last of the foil pans, because he cannot sit still in another man’s kitchen. He drives a propane route for the co-op and he is not a talker. In twenty-nine years of marriage I have heard him interrupt somebody maybe four times.

“Stay out of it, Jim,” Rick said. “This is family.”

“Twenty-nine years,” Jim said. “I carried the man’s casket this morning. I believe I’m in it.”

“Jim’s right about the pail,” Dale said slowly. “But Rick’s right about the money. A pail’s a pail. What was owed to Dad is owed to the three of us now. I’m not trying to cut you out, Lynn. I’m saying it isn’t only yours to sit on.”

He looked at the table when he said it. Then he said the rest.

“I’m three payments behind on the truck. Seven-eighty a month. The bank called me Tuesday. Tuesday, Lynn, with Dad laid out at the funeral home.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I’m not proud of it. But better than six thousand apiece, I could breathe.”

Dale does day work with that truck. He pulls a stock trailer for half the ranchers between here and Wilson, and it had been a thin summer for everybody. Without the truck he had no living. I knew that.

So there it was. One brother grieving in dollars, and one brother scared.

And here is what I turned over, sitting there with my hands in my lap. They were not wrong about whose money it was. If I said no, the pail is mine, we would be arguing until Christmas, and the whole time those forty-one slips would be sitting there, live. Rick had already read the names. He did not need my permission to pick up a telephone.

Arguing would only keep the slips alive.

There was just one way a slip stopped being worth anything to anybody, and my father had spent thirty years showing it to me.

“Add it up as many times as you want,” I said. I started folding the slips and laying them back in the pail, oldest on the bottom, the way he’d had them. “I’ll think on it.”

“Don’t think long,” Rick said. “Some of these people are old.”

“I know how old they are,” I said. “I send them all Christmas cards.”

I latched the lid. Jim carried the foil pans and I carried the pail. Nobody laughed when I went out the door with it.

I did not sleep. Around four I quit trying and sat in our kitchen with the pail on the table. Jim found me there when he got up for his route.

“You already know,” he said.

“I think I knew at Dad’s table. If I had said it out loud, Rick would have had that pail out of my hands before I got to the door.”

“How many names?”

“Thirty-three doors, I make it. Four counties.”