The White Oak My Husband Sold

“When is payroll?” I asked him.

He blinked at me. “Friday.”

“How much?”

“Seventy-four hundred,” he said. “For the two weeks. With the taxes.”

I unfolded the deed and looked at it, and then I folded it back up and put it in my coat pocket. Then I looked at Lonnie. “When’s the next check?” I asked him.

“Thursday,” he said. “Twelve thousand. Soon as the mill pays out on these loads.”

So I told them both how it was going to be, standing right there on the landing, and neither one of them argued with me.

The twenty-four thousand would come to me, the way we’d written it up at the courthouse.

Out of the first check I would write Jeff a check for seventy-four hundred dollars, and he would make his payroll on Friday like he had for nineteen years.

“Not a gift,” I said, looking right at him. “A loan. From me and Grandpa. And the truck goes back. I don’t care what you lose on it. You sell it this week, and what you get for it comes back to the land.”

He said, “Yes,” and then he said, “Renee, I’m so sorry,” and his voice went out on him altogether and he looked down at his boots.

“I know you are,” I said. “And I’m still mad. I’ll be mad a while. You’re going to have to let me be.”

“I can do that,” he said.

Then he looked at Lonnie and stuck out his hand. Lonnie looked at it a second, then took it, and the two of them shook hands there in the mud like men closing a deal on a heifer.

Then I walked to my car and he walked to that blue truck, and we drove home separately, one behind the other.

That night he slept in Logan’s old room. Nobody told him to.

He stayed in there almost three weeks. I want to be honest that I didn’t ask him to come back sooner.

Thursday the check came from the mill through Lonnie, made out to Renee Albrecht, twelve thousand dollars even.

I deposited it at the bank on the square and wrote Jeff a check for seventy-four hundred at the kitchen table that night.

He took it and looked at it a long time. Then he folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket and said, “Thank you.”

That was all. I think if he had said one word more he would have come apart.

Friday he made payroll. Tony and Mike and the Carter boy got paid the same as always, on time, and none of them ever knew how close it had been.

But he did tell them about the school job. He sat them down at the shop that Friday and told them the general contractor had gone under and the money was gone, and that work would be thin until spring.

Tony told him he’d go part time through February so Mike could keep full hours with the new baby.

Jeff told me that at supper and had to get up from the table and go stand at the back door for a minute.

The truck went the next Tuesday. Jeff sold it to a man in Mountain Grove who’d been looking for that exact model.

Between what he still owed the bank and what the truck had lost driving off the lot, he got back ten thousand of the twelve he’d put down.