The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

What Dennis said

He told her that Holm Implement was going under. He said it plainly, sitting on the floor. He said the last two years had been the worst he had seen in thirty. The farmers were not buying.

The ones who had bought were paying late. He had eleven machines on the lot that had been sitting there more than a year, and he was paying floor plan interest on every one of them, every month.

“The bank’s calling the line,” he said. “I’ve got until the end of August. Then it’s over. The building, the sign, all of it. Thirty years.”

“Does Patty know?” Mom asked.

He shook his head.

“Does anybody know?”

“No. Nobody.”

He said he had been sleeping three or four hours a night since January. He said he got up at four and drove around the section roads in the dark so Patty wouldn’t hear him pacing. He said every Sunday when Mom asked about her funeral money, he wanted to die.

“Then why?” she said. “Why the party, Dennis? Why that money?”

He was quiet for a long time. “Because I was turning sixty,” he said finally, “and in three months everyone in this town is going to know I failed. Every man I ever sold a tractor to. Everybody at church. Ron. Patty. The guys at the co-op.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I just wanted one night. One night where everybody looked at me like I was still the guy on the sign. Before it all came out.”

“So you took your mother’s burial money,” she said.

“I didn’t have any of my own left,” he said. “I’d already put it all into the business. The savings. Our retirement. I cashed out my IRA in February to make the floor plan payments.” He looked up at her. “I was going to put it back, Mom. I swear it. I just didn’t know how.”

I stood by the door and listened to my big brother cry. I had not heard him cry since we were kids. He was sixty years old and he was crying like a boy.

Mom did not say anything for a while. Then she leaned down, slowly, the way she does with her bad hip, and she put her hand on top of his head. On his thinning gray hair. She just held it there.

“You foolish boy,” she said, very quietly. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

“Because you’d have given it to me,” he said into his hands. “And I couldn’t stand that either.”

What Mom decided

She sat back up in the folding chair. She smoothed her skirt again. And then she told him exactly how it was going to be.

“You are going to pay it back,” she said. “Every dollar. Three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month for two years. I’ve done the arithmetic. Nine thousand dollars, twenty-four months.”

“Mom, I don’t know if I can…”

“You’ll find it. You’ll sell that bass boat. And you will put it into my account yourself, at Kim’s window, on the first of every month. Not into the drawer. Into my account. With a deposit slip I can read.”

He nodded. “And on Monday,” she said, “you are going to drive me to Farmers State, and you are going to take your name off that account, and your sister’s name is going on it.”

He looked at me then. I don’t know what I expected to see on his face. Anger, maybe. Shame. It was mostly relief.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s right. That’s how it should be.”

“And tonight,” she said, “after we leave this little room, you are going to tell Patty. Not tomorrow. Tonight, when you get home. She’s been your wife for thirty-four years and she deserves to hear it from you, not from the bank in August.”

“Mom…”

“Tonight, Dennis.”

He closed his eyes. “Tonight.”

“And you are going to call Pastor Kroll on Monday,” she said. “Because a man doesn’t go through a thing like this alone. That’s what a church is for.”

He laughed, a little wet laugh. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” said my mother. “Get up off that floor and go ask the band if they know ‘Could I Have This Dance.’ I haven’t danced with my son since his wedding.”