The Little Blue Book at the Bank

Brandon did not raise his voice. That was the part I kept coming back to afterward. He stood on his own front step with his arms folded and spoke to me the way you speak to a salesman.

“You don’t get to come over here and make comments about my truck,” he said. “Not in front of people. Not anywhere.”

I was holding an Easter basket. It had a chocolate rabbit in it, a plastic egg with four quarters inside, and a paperback about tractors that I knew Wyatt would make me read to him twice.

“I didn’t make a comment, Brandon,” I said. “I said it was a lot of truck. That’s all I said.”

Behind him, parked on the gravel where his old Chevy used to sit, was a black pickup a black crew cab with a chrome grille. It shone in the April sun, washed and waxed.

“You said it in front of the Hansens,” he said. “At the ball field. You know what that sounds like? It sounds like everybody in town gets to know my business because you paid some bills.”

“I have never told a soul what I paid,” I said. “Not one person.”

He looked past me toward the road. His jaw worked. For a second I thought he might say something else, something softer, but he didn’t.

“Jessa and I talked,” he said. “You hold money over us. Every time you look at me, you’re holding it over us. So you’re not going to see Wyatt for a while. Not until you let it go.”

I heard the screen door behind him creak. Jessa was standing in the dark of the hallway with her hand on the frame. She did not come out. She did not say anything.

Over her shoulder, in the front window, I could see a small face pressed to the glass. Wyatt had his hands cupped around his eyes the way he did when he was looking for deer from my back porch.

I set the basket down on the top step. I did it slowly, because my hands wanted to shake and I would not let them.

“That’s for Wyatt,” I said. “The quarters are for his bank. Tell him Grandma said happy Easter.”

Then I walked back to my car, and I backed out of their drive, and I did not cry until I was past the grain elevator and nobody could see me.