The Little Blue Book at the Bank

The porch

It was a Thursday night in November when an old white Ford pickup pulled into my drive. I knew that truck. It had a county road department sticker still on the back window that Duane had never scraped off.

I was in the kitchen in my robe. I turned on the porch light and went to the door.

Duane got out of the driver’s side. He is a big man, slow now, with a bad knee from all those years climbing up into the grader. He came around and opened the passenger door and stood there and waited.

After a minute, Brandon got out. He was wearing his work jacket from the co-op. He looked at the ground the whole way up my walk.

Duane did not hold his arm. He just walked behind him, close, the way you walk behind a calf you are trying to get through a gate.

They stopped at the bottom of my steps. I stood at the top in my robe with the porch light buzzing over my head.

“Marlene,” Duane said. “I’m sorry to come by this late. My son has something to say to you.”

Brandon looked up at me then. His eyes were wet. I had not seen him cry since the morning I bailed him out of jail.

“I don’t know how to start,” he said.

“Start with the truth,” Duane said quietly. “That’s where it always starts.”

Brandon nodded. He swallowed. And then he told me.

“Every time I see you,” he said, “I see that night. I see that woman’s arm. I see that jail. You paid for the worst thing I ever did in my life. Every time you looked at me, I knew you were thinking about it.”

“I wasn’t,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I know that now. But I was thinking about it. Every single first of the month, writing that check, I was thinking about it. Eight times I sat there and wrote down how much I still owed for being a drunk.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“I’ve been sober nineteen months,” he said. “Nineteen months this week. And I thought if I could just stop seeing you, I could stop feeling it. I thought if I had something new, something nobody had to pay for but me, I could be somebody else.”

“The truck,” I said.

“The truck,” he said. “It’s the stupidest thing I ever did, after the other thing. I can’t even make the payment without overtime. And I told Jessa you were holding money over us, because it was easier than saying I was ashamed.”

Duane spoke up then, not loud.

“I was the same,” he said. “When I got sober, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as my own brother. He’d bailed me out twice. I hated him for it for a year. It wasn’t him I hated.”