The Checkbook My Brother Signed Alone
“I don’t want to bankrupt you, Dean,” I said. “I know what twelve hundred a month for six months is to a family budget. We can work out how it comes back, slow if it has to be slow. I’m not looking to take anything from Sherry and the kids over this.”
“I know you’re not.” He looked down at his boots, the way Dad used to look down at his boots right before he said something he’d rather not say out loud. “I told myself all spring that it was fair because I was the one who stayed. I think I still believe that part. I think I just forgot, somewhere along the way, that you staying married off this place twenty years ago and hauling your own cattle through your own bad winters wasn’t the same as you not caring what happened to Dad’s.”
I thought about telling him then about the nights I’d spent those last two winters, driving the eleven miles over in Roy’s truck to help him check heifers in weather bad enough that Dad shouldn’t have been out in it at seventy-eight, nights nobody in town ever heard about because I never once thought they were owed to anybody as proof of anything. I didn’t say it. It would have sounded like keeping score, and I had promised myself in July I was not going to let this turn into two people keeping score at each other across our father’s grave.
“He died checking heifers at five in the morning because that was who he was,” I said instead. “Not because either one of us failed him. You carried that the longest, Dean. I’m not asking you to stop being the one who’s there every day. I’m asking you to let me be the one who’s there too, same as the will says we both are, whether I’m standing in the barn or not.”
He did not say much after that. Dean has never been a man for long speeches, any more than Dad was, and I did not expect one from him in a gravel parking lot with Mike Ostrand’s truck still idling twenty feet off. But he put his hand on my shoulder, the way he used to when we were kids and he’d done something he was sorry for and did not have the words to say it properly, and he said, “I miss him something awful, Marge,” and that was the truest thing either of us said all day, and it was enough.
We signed the new card at the co-op the following week, both our names, side by side, the way Dad’s name had sat alone on that line for fifty years because nobody ever imagined it would need to hold two. Dean paid the wage overage back into the account in three installments through the fall, and we sat down together, the two of us, at that same kitchen table in November, and worked out a real wage, a fair one, one that accounted for what he carried every day that I did not, and one that both our names agreed to before a single check against it was written.