The Wedding Loan I Was Left Holding

The morning after Amber and Tyler got back from Cancun, my phone rang at seven fifteen while I was still in my robe, and Tyler’s voice came through bright and easy, like a man calling to tell me the weather.

“Lanette,” he said, “I wanted to catch you before you left for the day.”

I had not left for anything in three years that required catching. I work four mornings a week at the elementary school cafeteria, serving trays to children who call me Miss Lanette, and the rest of my time belongs to a house that got very quiet after Ron died. But I said good morning and asked him how the beach was.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Listen, I wanted to talk to you about the loan.”

My stomach did the thing it does now whenever somebody says the word loan to me in that tone, light and sideways, like they are handing you something they expect you to just take.

“What about it,” I said.

“We’ve been talking,” he said, meaning him and Amber, though I would learn later that Amber had not been talking about this at all, “and we think it makes more sense if that loan just kind of becomes, you know, our wedding gift from you. You already co-signed it. It’s basically already yours to carry. We’re starting out, Lanette, we’ve got the new place, we’re trying to get on our feet.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and looked at the refrigerator, where a photo of Amber and Tyler from the wedding day is held up with a magnet shaped like a sunflower. White peonies. A string quartet under a tent. Amber’s hair had been pinned the way her father used to say Ron’s own mother wore hers, soft and simple, before Dan and Sue Rude got involved and the whole thing swelled to five tiers of cake and a sit-down dinner for a hundred and ten people and a venue by the lake that cost more by itself than Ron and I spent on our entire first house.

“Tyler,” I said, “that loan has my name on it because the bank required a co-signer. It was never going to be a gift. It was a loan. You and Amber are the ones who are supposed to be paying it.”

“Right, but you signed it,” he said, like that settled something.

“I signed it to help you,” I said. “Not to take it over.”

“Well,” he said, and I could hear him moving around, probably in that kitchen with the stainless appliances Dan and Sue had helped them pick out, “either way, you’ve got the house paid off and no kids at home anymore. You’ll be fine. We’re just starting out. I gotta run, we’ve got people coming by to see pictures.”