The Little Blue Book at the Bank

The note at my kitchen table

The lawyer was worth it. I will say that. He went over every minute of that night, and in the end the prosecutor agreed to a plea down to a first-offense OWI and full restitution to the nurse.

Brandon lost his license for a while. He did his two days, and he paid the fine. He did the substance abuse evaluation, and then, on his own, he went into the treatment program in Council Bluffs that April.

He came home thinner. He came home quiet. The first Sunday after, he came over to my house by himself, without Jessa, without Wyatt, and sat down at my kitchen table with a sheet of paper.

He had typed it up himself at the library. It said that he owed me thirty-eight thousand dollars, that he would pay it back at five hundred dollars a month starting May first, and that he would not stop until it was done.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

He picked up my pen and signed it, and his hand shook so badly that the signature was just a scribble. He looked at it and shook his head and signed it again underneath, slower.

I signed it too. Then I put it in the drawer by the stove where Dale used to keep the warranties, and I made him a ham sandwich, because he looked like he had not eaten in a week.

For eight months, he paid. A check came in my mailbox on the first of every month, five hundred dollars, in Brandon’s square handwriting. In the memo line he wrote the number. One. Two. Three.

I deposited every one of them at the bank on Main Street. Karen, who has been at that window for twenty-some years and knows everybody’s business without ever repeating a word of it, stopped asking me what they were after the second one.

Those months were good. I want to say that, too. Brandon was sober, and you could see it in his face. He went back to work at the co-op. He coached Wyatt’s tee ball team. He fixed my porch railing without being asked.

And Wyatt came to me every summer day the way he always had. He was five that summer, and he turned six that September. We picked green beans. We drove out to the county fair. He strung a chain of wooden beads for my reading glasses because I kept losing them, and I wore it every single day.

When the checks stopped

The ninth check did not come in January.

I told myself it was the bills after Christmas. January is hard on young families. I did not say anything. The tenth check did not come in February, and I did not say anything then either.

By March I had stopped looking in the mailbox on the first. I still had the note in the drawer. I did not take it out. Thirty-four thousand dollars was still owed on it, and I decided I could live without it.

Then, in March, Jessa posted a picture of Wyatt sitting in the driver’s seat of a big black pickup, grinning with both hands on the wheel. Under it she wrote, “Somebody’s excited about Daddy’s new ride.”

I zoomed in on the picture. You do not need to be a car person. It was a crew cab, a high trim, the kind with the big chrome grille. I looked up the model that night. It was about fifty-two thousand dollars.

I sat at my kitchen table with my phone in one hand and my coffee going cold in the other. I did the math anyway, though I did not want to. Five hundred dollars a month was less than half of what that truck payment had to be.

I did not call anybody. I prayed about it. I asked the Lord to take the sour feeling out of my mouth, and most days He did.

Then, at Wyatt’s first ball game of the spring, I was standing by the fence with Jessa and the Hansens from church, and Brandon pulled into the lot in that black truck, and it all came out of me in one sentence.

“Well, that’s a lot of truck,” I said.

That was all. I did not say anything about money. I did not say anything about checks. But Brandon heard me, and Mary Hansen heard me, and I saw his face go red all the way down to his collar.

Two weeks later I stood on his step with an Easter basket and he told me I would not be seeing my grandson.