The Little Blue Book at the Bank

What happened in that house

I did not know any of this until later. I am telling it to you the way Jessa told it to me, sitting at my kitchen table in January with both her hands around a mug of tea.

The card came on a Tuesday. Wyatt opened it at the table after supper, and the dinosaur roared, and he laughed so hard he fell off his chair. He waved the twenty-dollar bill around like he had won the lottery.

Then the passbook fell out onto the table. Wyatt did not know what it was. Jessa picked it up. She read the first page. Then she turned back to the cover and read my pencil line.

Jessa told me she read it four times. Payments from your dad, 8 of 76.

“Brandon,” she said. “What does this mean?”

He was at the sink, rinsing a plate. She said he did not turn around for a long time.

Here is the part I did not know, the part I had never imagined. Jessa had not known that Brandon stopped paying me. He had told her, back in January, that he was paying it straight out of his paycheck at the co-op now, an automatic transfer, and she could stop worrying about it.

She believed him. Why wouldn’t she? He had been doing so well.

And when he came home from the ball field that day in April and said I had embarrassed him in front of the Hansens, she believed that, too. She thought I was holding the money over him. She thought he was paying and I was still keeping score.

“I wouldn’t have let you keep her away,” Jessa told him that night. “Not for one week. Not if I’d known.”

Brandon did not argue. Jessa said that was the worst part. He did not argue at all. He just put the plate down in the sink and walked out to the garage and sat in that black truck with the doors shut.

Duane

Brandon’s father is Duane Kessler. He drove a county road grader for thirty-four years and plowed out half the farm lanes in our end of the county before he retired. Everybody knows Duane, and everybody knows he drank hard when he was young. He has been sober thirty years, and he still goes to the Tuesday meeting in the Methodist church basement.

The week after the passbook came, Jessa drove over to Duane’s house by herself. She sat at his kitchen table and put the passbook down in front of him and told him everything.

Duane had not known any of it. Brandon had told his father that the lawyer was paid with a loan from a bank in Council Bluffs. He had never said my name. Duane thought his son was paying a bank. He did not know he was paying a widow.

Jessa said Duane sat with the little blue book in his big hands for a long time. Then he said, “That boy of mine is going to walk up her steps if I have to carry him.”