The Rent Book in the Frame

The garage

Cody turned to me then. His eyes were wet under the bill of his cap. He swallowed a couple of times before he could get anything out.

“Meg,” he said. “I swear to you, on Dad, I didn’t know. I never would have taken a dollar of it. Not one dollar.”

And I believed him. I believed him before he even finished the sentence.

I had known my brother my whole life, and I had let our mother talk me into thinking he was somebody he wasn’t, for five long weeks.

“I know,” I said. “I see that now, Cody. I’m sorry I thought it.”

He looked down at the frame one more time. Then he handed it to Kayla, gently, the way you would hand somebody a sleeping baby.

“Come out to the garage with me a minute,” he said to me.

Then he walked into the kitchen, right past the cake, and took Grandma’s blue jar down off the windowsill. He pulled the red ribbon off its neck and laid the ribbon on the counter.

Everybody watched him do it. Mom watched him do it. He didn’t say a word to her. He carried the jar through the laundry room and out into the garage, and I followed him.

The garage was cold and smelled like new concrete and motor oil.

His big red rolling tool chest was already against the back wall, the one he’d paid off a little at a time over six years.

He set the jar on top of the tool chest. Then he opened the top drawer and took out a yellow work order pad from the implement dealer and a ballpoint pen.

“I don’t have thirty-three thousand dollars, Meg,” he said. “You know I don’t. Everything we had went into closing, right on top of what Mom gave us. We’re down to about nothing.”

“I know that, Cody,” I said. “I’m not asking you for it.”

“You don’t have to ask,” he said. “I can do four hundred a month. Same as you did. Kayla and I went over the house budget twice. With my harvest overtime we can do it. It’ll take seven years. Same as it took you.”

The note

He wrote it out on the work order pad right there, leaning on the tool chest, in the same blocky printing he puts on every repair ticket at the dealer.

I, Cody Teague, owe my sister Megan Teague $33,600. I will pay her $400 on the first of every month until it is paid in full.

He signed it, and dated it, and tore the sheet off and handed it to me.

Then he opened the second drawer of the tool chest and took out a white bank envelope. There was cash in it. He counted out four hundred dollars in twenties on the top of the chest.

“Farmer up by Chase paid me cash for an injector pump job last week,” he said.

“I was going to buy a new deer stand with it. I guess I’m not buying a deer stand this year.”

He folded the twenties over once and dropped them into Grandma’s blue jar.

They didn’t make a bell sound the way my pennies used to. They didn’t make any sound at all. But I heard it anyway.

Then he picked up the jar and put it into my hands. “This is yours,” he said. “It was always yours. Grandma would want it on your windowsill, Meggie. Not mine. Not Mom’s.”

I stood there holding that jar, and I cried in my brother’s garage like I was eight years old.

He put his arms around me, jar and all, and his shirt smelled like diesel and cake frosting.

“I’m sorry, Meggie,” he said into my hair. “I’m so sorry. I should have asked her where it came from. I knew Mom didn’t have it. I just wanted it to be true so bad.”