The Wedding Money and the House Money

Ashley’s car came up the drive, and I could see the shape of Rick’s mother, Bev, in the passenger seat with her good church coat buttoned to the neck.

Bev is eighty years old. She still lives alone in a little house by the Methodist church in town, and she still makes the best rhubarb pie in three counties, and she has a way of looking at you over her glasses that makes grown men confess to things.

Ashley helped her up the back steps and into the kitchen. Bev took her coat off and handed it to Rick without looking at him and sat down at the head of the table, which is not her place, and nobody said a word about it.

Ashley sat next to her sister. They did not hug, but Ashley put her hand on Kelsey’s knee under the table for a second, and I saw it, and I had to look down at the checkbook.

“Well,” Bev said. “Rick tells me nothing, so Ashley told me everything on the drive over. I want to say something before you all start. And then I’ll keep quiet and eat that cake.”

Rick said, “Mom, you don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do,” Bev said. “Sit down, son. You’re making the room nervous.”

He sat. Rick does not sit for anybody, but he sat for his mother.

“In 1986,” Bev said, “your father and I gave Dale the down payment on the Lindquist place. Forty thousand dollars, which was everything we had and some we didn’t. And when Rick got married five years later, we told him there was nothing left.”

“I know, Mom,” Rick said.

“No, you don’t know,” she said. “You know what we told you. Here’s what you don’t know. There wasn’t nothing left. There was some. Not forty thousand. But there was some.”

The kitchen got so quiet I could hear the clock over the stove and the combine across the road.

“Dale asked,” Bev said. “He came to us with a plan and a banker’s letter and he asked. You never asked, Rick. You never asked for one thing in your life. And your father said, the boy who asks is the boy who needs it. And I let him say it.”

She looked at her son with her hands folded on the oilcloth. “I have been sorry for that for thirty-five years. I am sorry. I should have told you a long time ago. I was too proud and then I was too old.”

Rick looked at the table. His jaw worked. He did not say anything for a long time, and then he reached over and put his big rough hand over his mother’s small one, and he left it there.

That was the first time I had ever seen my husband cry, and I have been married to him for thirty-five years.

He did not make a sound. It just ran down into the collar of his county jacket, and he let it.

Kelsey got up and went around the table and put her arms around her father’s neck from behind, the way she did when she was eight and he came home from plowing snow all night. He reached up and held onto her arm.

Ashley was crying. I was crying. Bev was not crying. Bev was looking at me.

“Carol Ann,” she said. “I know about your mother. Rick told me years ago. So here’s the other half. Don’t give to the one who asks. That’s what I did. But don’t hold on so tight you can’t give at all. I’m eighty. I know what both of those cost.”