The Morning I Paid My Father Back

My mother

My mother, Julie, had been divorced from my father since I was twelve. She lived in a manufactured home out on County Road 300 with two cats and a garden that could have fed the whole town. She worked the deli counter at the grocery store.

I called her that night. She listened to all of it, and then she was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

“Mom?”

“I’m here.” I heard her let out a breath. “I’m just trying to decide whether to drive over there.”

“Don’t. Please. That’s what Tyler said too.”

“Tyler’s a good man.” She said it like a fact, the way she said the sky was blue. “Your father knows that. That’s half his problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing I should say tonight.” She cleared her throat. “Kayla, I’ll walk you. You know I will. I’d be proud to.”

I closed my eyes. I wanted to say yes. I almost did.

“Can I wait?” I asked. “Can I leave his seat empty a little longer? I’m going to pay him back the morning of. I’m going to tell him the seat is still his.”

My mother did not answer right away.

“You’re a better person than I was at your age,” she finally said. “All right. But if he doesn’t come, I’m there.”

Grandpa Harold

The next Sunday, I drove out to see my grandfather.

Harold Brenneman was eighty nine years old. He had milked cows on the same eighty acres east of town for fifty years, and he still lived in the white farmhouse there, though the barn had been empty since 2009. My father was his only son.

Grandpa was on the porch in his chore coat, though it was May and warm. His cane hung on the arm of the glider. He watched me come up the steps and did not get up, which meant his knees were bad that day.

“Your dad called me,” he said before I sat down.

I stopped. “He did?”

“Told me he wasn’t walking you. Told me why.” Grandpa looked out at the empty barn. “I told him he was a fool. He hung up on me. First time in his life he ever hung up on me.”

I sat down on the glider beside him. It creaked the way it had creaked my whole life.

“I’m going to pay him back,” I said. “The three thousand.”

“I figured you might.” He nodded slowly. “You always were the one who paid back a borrowed pencil.”

We sat for a while. A truck went by on the gravel and somebody honked and Grandpa lifted two fingers off his knee.

“If he doesn’t come,” Grandpa said, “I’ll walk you. As far as these legs will go.”

“Grandpa, it’s a long aisle.”

“Then I’ll go slow.” He turned and looked at me, and his eyes were wet. “I didn’t walk your aunt Carol’s girl because I had the pneumonia. I’ve regretted it twenty years. I’m not missing another one.”

I put my head on his shoulder. He smelled like Old Spice and hay, the way he always had.

The bank

I took the money out on Friday, the day before the wedding.

First State Bank has one location, on the corner across from the courthouse, and I had banked there since I opened a passbook savings account at eight years old. The teller was a woman named Brenda who had gone to school with my mother.

“Three thousand in cash?” she asked. She did not ask it like she was suspicious. She asked it like she was worried.

“Hundreds, please.”

She counted them out twice on the counter, thirty crisp bills, and slid them into an envelope. Then she put her hand flat on top of the envelope before she gave it to me.

“Is this for the wedding, honey?”

“Sort of,” I said.

She looked at me a second longer. Then she took her hand away and said, “You look beautiful tomorrow. You hear me?”