The Loan Papers I Signed Alone

I have seen him cry twice in twenty-two years, at his mother’s funeral and when Abby was born. He did not tell me whether that was the third time, and I did not ask.

When he came back downstairs, his dad was sitting on the porch steps.

Arnie had not called ahead. He had just driven out in his old pickup and sat down on the top step to wait, the way men of his generation do.

Abby had stopped at his house on her way out of town the week before, to say goodbye, and she had asked him to go check on her dad on move-in day.

“She said you’d be by yourself,” Arnie said, “and you’re no good by yourself. Never were.”

Jeff sat down next to him. For a while neither of them said anything.

Arnie looked out at the machine shed, where the side-by-side sat in the shade with its cab doors shut.

“Kris signed for that girl’s school by herself,” Arnie said finally. “Abby told me. She wasn’t complaining. She was proud of her mother. But she told me you wouldn’t.”

“You of all people know why,” Jeff said. “You lost the place, Dad. I watched you lose it.”

Arnie took off his seed corn cap and turned it around in his hands.

Jeff said it was a long time before he said anything, and when he did his voice was not like his usual voice.

“I paid my own way through the ag school at Waseca in 1972,” Arnie said.

“Worked hog barns at five in the morning and went to class at eight. Took me four years to pay off what I borrowed for it. Best money I ever spent. Every bit of what I knew about running that farm, I learned there.”

“Then the farm still went,” Jeff said.

“The farm went because I borrowed for more land at eighteen percent when everybody said land never goes down,” Arnie said.

“It went because I was too proud to ask anybody for help until it was too late. School didn’t take my farm, son. Pride and bad timing took my farm. Don’t you go making my mistake backwards.”

Jeff said he did not have an answer for that. He said he just sat there.

“If that girl had asked me,” Arnie said, “I’d have co-signed it twice. I’d have co-signed it with my bad hip and my Social Security check and gone without coffee.

“And you know what? So would you, a year from now, when you got over being scared. Only a year from now she’d be pouring coffee at the café full time, and you’d have had a nice ride in your new toy.”

He put his cap back on. He stood up slow, the way he does, one hand on the porch post.

“She’s sleeping in a strange bed an hour away tonight,” Arnie said, “and her daddy never even saw her room. You’ve got time to fix that. I didn’t always have time to fix mine.”

Then he went down the steps, got in his pickup and drove home.

At a quarter to nine that night, Abby and I were sitting on the floor of her dorm room eating pizza out of the box, because the desk was covered with things that did not have a place yet.

Her phone buzzed on the carpet. She looked at it and went still.

“It’s Dad,” she said. “He wants to know what room.”