The Oak Table That Paid for Her Braces

I opened the door before she could knock. She stood there on my porch in her church cardigan, though it was eighty-one degrees, and looked at me for a long moment with Shane’s same gray eyes.

“Jessica,” she said, “Marlene Hagen sat next to me at church yesterday and showed me a picture of her new table.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of one thing to say that would not sound like an excuse, so I stepped back and held the door open, and she came in.

She stopped in the dining room doorway and looked at the card table and the two folding chairs and the dark rectangle on the carpet. She looked at it the way you look at a grave.

“Marlene was so proud,” Bev said. “She held her phone out to me during the passing of the peace. ‘Bev, look what Russ found on the Facebook. Isn’t it the prettiest thing.’ And I looked, and I said, ‘Marlene, have Russ turn over a chair.'”

“Bev, I’m so sorry.”

She held up her free hand. “Let me finish. I’ve been practicing this in the car the whole way over.”

So I let her finish.

“I asked her if there were two letters carved underneath on the left side. S.K. She went white and said she’d ask Russ.”

Bev took a breath. “After church Russ called me himself, and he told me about a woman in a hairdresser’s smock and a girl on the front step with her hand over her mouth.”

She stopped there for a second. Her chin did something.

“And then he told me about the Jet Ski. Because apparently the whole town has seen the Jet Ski, except me, because I don’t look at the Facebook.”

“I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

“I know you didn’t. You didn’t want me to find out at all.” She looked at me hard. “That was the only part you got wrong, honey. You should have called me.”

I told her the truth, which was that I couldn’t. That she was Shane’s mother first, and I wasn’t going to make a seventy-six-year-old widow pick between her son and her granddaughter over $600.

“Well,” Bev said. “I picked anyway.”

She told me what happened Sunday afternoon. She had called Shane from the kitchen phone, the one on the wall with the long cord, and told him to come to the house.

Not asked. Told. He was there in fifteen minutes, still in his swim trunks, with lake water in his hair.

She sat him down in the chair by her back door, the one where she used to make the boys take off their boots, and she asked him one question.

What did your daughter’s teeth cost, and what did that boat cost?

“And do you know what my son did?” Bev said. “He cried. Forty-five years old and he sat in that chair and cried like he was nine.”

It came out of him in a pile. The implement dealer had cut him back to thirty-two hours in June, because the farmers were holding off on repairs with corn prices where they were.

He was behind on his truck payment. He was behind on his rent by half a month. He had a credit card he didn’t open the bills for anymore.

And the Jet Ski was nothing down and no payments for six months, from the dealer over in Waseca. He’d signed for it in about twenty minutes on a Saturday.