The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

I let it ring twice. Then I answered.

“Shannon,” he said. His voice was rough, like he had a cold, or like he had been crying for a while and stopped. “I’m looking at the picture. Mrs. Hollis sent it an hour ago.”

I did not say anything. I let him go on.

“She’s in the front row,” he said. “She’s right in the middle. She looks so happy. I’ve never seen her look like that. Not even at Christmas.”

“I know,” I said.

“I did that,” he said. “Not the happy part. The other part. I took that from her. I stood in the garage and told her she wasn’t worth it, and then you drove her eleven hundred miles to prove I was wrong. And you didn’t even have to prove it. I knew I was wrong when I said it.”

“Can I talk to her?” he asked.

“She’s in the shower,” I said. “But Kevin, I don’t think this is a phone call. Is it?”

He was quiet a long time. “No,” he said. “No, you’re right. She deserves it to her face. I’ll be here when you get home.”

We stayed through Thursday. At Arlington we watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Avery held my hand without seeming to know she was doing it.

We started home Friday at five in the morning, the same sixteen hours in reverse. Avery counted the states backward.

The gloves stayed on the dashboard. We got into our driveway a little after nine that night, and the porch light was on.

Kevin was sitting on the top step with Duke lying beside him. He stood up when our headlights hit him. He had shaved. He was holding a white envelope in both hands, and he held it like it was hot.

He waited until we were both out of the car. He did not come down the steps toward me.

He walked past me, straight to Avery, and stopped in front of her, and he had to look down because she is still a head shorter than he is.

“Avery,” he said. “I need to say something to you, and I need you to just let me get through it.”

“I took your money,” he said. “It was yours. You earned it in that corn, every hot day of it, and I watched you do it, and I took it anyway because I was scared and I didn’t want to tell your mom about a mess from before her. That’s the truth.”

He swallowed. “And then I said that thing about farm kids, and that wasn’t true at all. I said it so I’d feel less like what I was.”

He held out the envelope.

“There’s thirty-two hundred dollars in there,” he said. “Every dollar. I counted it three times. I’m not asking you to forgive me for it. I’m just giving back what’s yours.”

I found out later where it came from, because I asked, and because his brother Rick told me at the Fourth of July picnic when Kevin was out of earshot.

Kevin saves all year for deer season. It is the one thing he does for himself.

He keeps a coffee can on the top shelf in the garage, and he puts his overtime in it, every extra shift at the co-op, for his share of the hunting ground he rents every fall with his brothers and for his tags and his shells.