Forty Years of Banking Across Main Street

Craig

He came that evening, a little after six.

I was still at Mother’s doing dishes, and Roscoe had stayed with me. We were drying the last pot when a car door shut out front. Roscoe looked out the window. I watched his shoulders square.

“It’s the boy.”

“Let him knock,” I said. “He’s thirty-six. He’s somebody’s husband.”

Craig knocked, a small, unsure sound.

Mother opened the door in her apron. He stood on the porch with his tie loosened and the fish clip gone, and I realized I had never in eleven years seen him without it. His face had the scrubbed look of someone who has been sitting a long time in a parked car.

“Dot. May I come in?”

She stepped back.

He stood in her kitchen with his hands hanging, and Roscoe stayed at the sink and did not say a word. Craig looked at the faded picture of Howard in his railroad cap.

“I’ve got nothing that makes it better,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to hear it from somebody else first.”

“Sit down, Craig. I’d rather you sat. I’m seventy-nine.”

He sat. The chair groaned.

“I got turned down for the boat,” he said, to the tabletop. “At the bank in Salem. They said my debt was too high, the truck and the student loan and the cards. I’d already put $1,500 down. I’d told the whole bass club I’d have it by Memorial Day.” He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I asked you to sign because I thought you’d say yes. And when you said no, it felt like the whole town was laughing at me. That’s no excuse. I had a desk. I had a pen. You came in with a folder and a church coat, and I looked at you and saw the one person who’d made me feel small, and I used what I had.”

“You used my furnace,” Mother said.

“Yes ma’am.”

“In October.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She let it sit. She has never once in her life rushed a silence.

“Craig. I’m going to tell you two things, and then I’m going to ask you to eat something. The first is that I forgive you. That is mine to give, and I give it now. I won’t carry it around. I’ve carried a few of those and they weigh more than they’re worth.”

He nodded, twice, and looked at the floor.

“The second is that my money is staying where it is. Forgiving you and trusting you are two different animals, and I’ve lived long enough to know which one takes longer to feed. If you want to earn the second, you have all the time in the world. I may not. But Lily will.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s fair.”

“Now. There’s pot roast.”

He stayed for supper, and he washed his own plate after. When Roscoe walked him out to the car, I heard my husband say a few low words. Later he told me what they were.

“I said a man can be wrong for a week and fixed for the rest of his life, and it’s his call which way he goes. He said, ‘Yes sir.’ I’ll count that as a start.”