The Pan of Bars on Nicole’s Porch
Nicole and Kyle live on Elm, in a white house with green shutters that Kyle painted the summer they bought it. I have been in that house a thousand times. I know where the spoons are.
There was snow along the front steps that nobody had shoveled since Thursday. I noticed that. Nicole always shoveled. Nicole was the kind of person who shoveled the neighbor’s steps too.
I carried the pan up with both hands. I stood on the porch in my church coat and my good scarf, and I knocked.
It took a long time. I heard feet inside, and voices, low.
Then the door opened, and it was Nicole in sweatpants and an old Badgers sweatshirt, with no makeup and her hair in a clip. She looked like she had not slept since the hearing. She looked like I felt.
And behind her, at the kitchen table, with her coffee and her church coat still on, was Jean.
Nicole saw the pan. Her mouth opened and closed.
I did not raise my voice. I had promised myself in the car I would not, and I had promised God in the pew.
“I brought your mom’s bars,” I said. “I need to know why.”
Nicole’s face crumpled. She put her hand over her mouth. She did not say anything.
Jean got up from the table. She is seventy and has bad knees, and she walked slowly across that kitchen, and she took the pan out of my hands. She looked down at the bars through the plastic wrap, and then at me, and then at her daughter.
“Amber made my bars,” Jean said quietly. “Nicole Marie. You look at that pan.”
Nicole looked.
“Now you tell her,” Jean said. “You tell her what you told me Thursday night. Or I will.”
“Mom.”
“I sat in my car outside that courthouse,” Jean said, “because you asked me not to come in. And I watched Amber walk out of there holding on to her daddy’s arm. And I knew. I knew before you told me.”
Nicole sat down on the bench inside the door where they keep the boots. She sat there in her sweatpants and cried in a way I had not seen since the deer stand.
“Come in,” Jean said to me. “It’s cold. Come in and sit down.”
I sat at the table where I had written the check three years before. Jean put the bars down in the middle of it and did not take the plastic off. She poured me coffee without asking, black, which is how I take it, because she has known that since I was nineteen.
Nicole came and sat across from me. She wiped her face with the sleeve of the sweatshirt.
“It’s the shop,” she said.
I waited.
“Kyle’s shop,” she said. “It’s been going under since the spring. The insurance companies pay so slow now, and they send everybody to the big shop in Janesville, and Kyle had the frame machine payment, and then the roof.” She took a breath. “The bank wouldn’t give us anything more. So last March Kyle borrowed from Shane.”