The Notary at Mother’s Birthday Supper

The real thing

Jodi was the one who asked it.

“Why?” she said to Kyle. Not mean. She sounded about eleven. “You make good money. You’ve got a house. Why would you do that?”

Kyle looked at the quitclaim deed lying in the middle of the table. All the easy had gone out of him. He looked like a man who has been holding a ladder for a long time.

“Because I’m in trouble,” he said.

Dana made a small sound. She had not looked up from her plate since the paper came out, and I had taken that for guilt. I saw then that it was something more worn out than guilt.

“I told him to ask you,” she said to Mom. Her voice was thin. “I told him in August. I said, just go out there and tell her and ask. He said he’d sooner cut his arm off.”

“How much trouble?” Mom said.

Kyle rubbed his face with both hands. He pours concrete. Driveways, shop floors, feedlot bunks, the new sidewalks at the school. He has had his own outfit for fourteen years, two trucks and four men, and his hands look like it.

“Forty-eight thousand behind. About.”

“Behind on what?”

“All of it.” He let out a breath. “There was a builder in Omaha. Two big jobs last fall, a whole subdivision’s worth of basements and flatwork. I floated the mud and the rebar and the payroll on my line at the bank, like always, thirty days. He went under in January. He owed me thirty-one thousand and I’ll never see a nickel. I’m one of about forty people he owed.”

He was talking to the table.

“I didn’t want to lay anybody off. So I kept the guys on through the winter and put it on the cards. Then the skid steer note got behind. Then the house. We’re three months down on the house, Mom. I got a letter.”

“And the bank won’t lend you more,” Mom said.

“Not with nothing to put up. But if I had this place in my name, free and clear, I could borrow sixty against it in a week. Get square. Pay it back out of next season, and nobody would ever have to know I’d been that stupid.” He finally looked at her. “I was going to put it back. I swear on Dad. I was going to fix it and split it right, just like I said. I just needed it to be mine for a while.”

“And if next season went like last season?”

He did not answer that. There was not an answer, and he knew it. The bank would have had our mother’s house.

I waited for the anger to come up in me, and I am ashamed to say I wanted it to. I had been owed that anger a long time.

What came instead was a picture of my brother in January, in his truck in some lot in Omaha, reading that the man was bankrupt, and then driving home and paying four men anyhow.