The Christmas Checks That Never Came

What I did not know was whether Darlene had put that money somewhere else. A college fund, maybe. A savings bond.

I knew Darlene to be tight with money, and I had to allow that she might have tucked it away somewhere I had not thought of.

What I did know was that my children had never once opened a card from Great-Grandma Ruth at Christmas. Not once. Not a check, not a card, not a word.

And Owen had never owned a new fishing reel. Lily had never owned a dollhouse with a little porch.

I would have remembered that dollhouse. I would have stepped on its furniture in the dark a hundred times.

Monday, on my lunch break at the dental office, I sat in my car again with a turkey sandwich I didn’t eat and pulled up both savings accounts on my phone.

The bank kept statements going back seven years. I went through every December and every January for the last four years, line by line, the way Ruth would have done it with her pencil.

Birthday money from my folks, fifty dollars at a time. A twenty from Nick’s aunt. Tooth fairy dollars Lily had insisted on depositing herself, which the bank teller had counted out with a straight face.

Not one deposit of five hundred dollars. Not one deposit of anything in December or January except twenty dollars that I remembered putting in myself.

I did the math on the back of a napkin, though I didn’t need to. Four Christmases. Two kids. Five hundred dollars each. Four thousand dollars.

I told Nick that night at the kitchen table, after the dishes.

I printed the statements at work and laid them out in front of him in order, oldest to newest, the way I would lay out x-rays for a dentist.

Nick is a lineman for the electric co-op. He is thirty-nine, broad through the shoulders, and quiet the way men who work up high are quiet.

He reads a thing all the way through before he says anything about it.

He read the statements twice. Then he set them down and looked at the wall for a while, at the calendar from the feed store with the picture of a red barn in the snow.

“You’re sure she said Mom,” he said.

“She said Darlene told her all about the reel,” I said. “And the dollhouse. She said the kids loved them.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up and reached for his keys on the hook by the door. He didn’t slam anything. Nick never slams anything. He just picked them up.

“Nick,” I said. “Wait. Please sit down a minute.”

He stood there with the keys in his hand. I could see the muscle in his jaw going.

“She lied to Grandma,” he said quietly. “She sat there and told a ninety-one-year-old woman a story about a fishing reel. Four years, Kayla.”

“I know,” I said. “I know she did. Sit down with me for one minute, and then if you still want to go, I won’t stop you.”

He sat. He kept the keys in his fist on the table.

I had been thinking about it all afternoon, between the deer stand and the man after him, and I had come to three things.

I laid them out for Nick the same way I had laid out the statements.

The first was his dad. Four Octobers ago, Tom had a heart attack in the yard at the grain elevator where he drove truck.