The Checkbook My Brother Signed Alone

Dad had been gone eleven weeks when my brother Dean set the checkbook on the kitchen table, slid it toward me with one finger, and told me the ground was his to run now.

“You married off the place twenty years ago, Marge,” he said. “I’m the one who stayed.”

I was standing at the stove with a dish towel over my shoulder, reheating coffee that didn’t need reheating, just to have something to do with my hands. Roy was out at the truck, giving us room, which is a thing he does, my husband, when he knows a conversation belongs to somebody else’s family and not his.

“I’m not asking to run anything,” I said. “I asked if the calving went all right in that weather.”

“It went fine.” Dean tapped the checkbook again. “I’m just saying. Since I’m the one here every day, I started drawing a wage. Same as any hired man would get. Dad never paid me one, not once in forty years, and I figure that’s overdue.”

I looked at that checkbook sitting there, blue plastic cover gone soft and curled at the corners, the same one Dad had carried in his coat pocket to the co-op and the elevator and the vet’s office since before I left home at nineteen. I did not pick it up. I did not ask to see the numbers. I poured the coffee I did not need and said, “All right, Dean,” and that was the whole conversation, that day.

I want to tell you why I did not ask to see the books, because I know how that sounds, like I did not care, like I let it go. I did care. I just knew my brother. A checkbook can be rewritten on the drive into town if a man knows somebody is coming to look at it. A number can get moved from one line to another and called something else by the time anybody with authority over it sits down across the table. I was not going to win anything by asking Dean to show me what Dean had already decided to show me. I was going to have to find out some other way, from somewhere he did not control, and I was willing to wait for it.

I did not know yet that the waiting would take until September.