The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

Paid in Full

That night I sat at my kitchen table with a receipt book from the Ben Franklin, the kind with the carbon copies, that I had bought years ago for selling sweet corn at the end of the driveway.

My lawyer had said a written receipt was the clean way to show the debt was settled. I wrote it out in my best handwriting. The date. Sold to Jake Lindgren, one 2016 bass boat, 20 feet, with 225 outboard and trailer. Received, $38,000.00, cashier’s check.

Then I sat there with the pen for a long time.

My lawyer had told me, back in the second year, that interest was building on the judgment the whole time Rick didn’t pay.

By now it was a few thousand dollars more than the $38,000. I could have kept after it.

I thought about that. I thought about the Cancun pictures. Then I thought about Cole, who would have to have a father for the next fifty years, whether that father paid me interest or not.

Across the bottom of the receipt, I wrote “Paid in full.” I underlined it once. That was my choice, and I made it on purpose. The $38,000 was what the judge said. I didn’t want one dollar past it.

I tore off the top copy, folded it in thirds, and put it in an envelope addressed to Rick at Brittany’s house on Third Street. The carbon copy stayed in the book.

The next morning I drove it to the post office on my way to school and sent it certified, so he’d have it in writing and I’d know he got it.

It cost me eight dollars and some cents. The best eight dollars I ever spent.

I didn’t post anything about it. Not one word. I didn’t tell the girls in the kitchen at school, even when Deb asked why I was humming. The only person I told was Cole.

Okay, Mom

I called him that Monday night, after the boat was gone and before I mailed the receipt. I wanted him to hear it from me and not from somebody at the elevator.

I told him all of it, start to finish. The text his dad read and never answered. Arnie and the coffee. Jake and the cashier’s check. The clean rectangle on the shed floor.

Then I stopped and waited. I could hear the TV in his dorm room, and somebody laughing down the hall.

Cole didn’t say anything for so long that I thought the call had dropped.

“Cole? Honey, are you there?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“Are you mad at me?”

There was another long quiet. I sat there at the kitchen table with my hand flat over my heart, which is something my mother used to do, and I never knew I did it too until that night.

“Okay, Mom,” he said finally. That was all. Just “Okay, Mom,” in a voice that sounded older than nineteen.