The Sundays My Father Never Explained

The checkbook

I want to say I asked him that night. I didn’t.

I got him inside and got his pills into him and made him a grilled cheese, and while he was eating it, I went into Mom’s old desk in the front room.

I told myself I was looking for the phone bill. I know exactly what I was doing.

Dad still keeps his checkbook register by hand, the way Mom taught him, every check and every deposit, with the balance carried down in pencil. He keeps the old registers too, stacked in a shoebox in the bottom drawer, rubber-banded by year.

Every month since Mom died, I had left Dad a check for two hundred dollars under the sugar bowl on the first of the month.

On the memo line I always wrote “groceries,” because he would not take a dime from me for anything else, and he was living close to the bone on Social Security and what Craig paid him in cash rent.

I opened the current register and there was my check. Deposited, the first of October. Two hundred dollars.

And on the second of October, a check written out for two hundred dollars. To the care home. The memo line said “I.M. account.”

I went back a month. The same. I went back a year. The same.

I opened the shoebox and went back four years, to the month after we buried Mom. Every single month, the same.

Then I went back further, to before Mom died, when there was no check from me to deposit. The two hundred went out anyway, on the second of every month, back to the first one, nine years ago.

Nine years. One hundred and eight checks. Twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars.

The first five years he paid it out of his own pocket, out of what little he and Mom had. The last four, he had paid it with my grocery money. Nine thousand six hundred dollars of it was mine.

And all those four years I had been worried sick that he wasn’t eating.

I had slipped extra bread and lunch meat into his refrigerator when he wasn’t looking, while every dime I gave him went forty miles south to a woman I had never heard of.

I put the registers back in the shoebox, exactly the way I had found them, and I went back into the kitchen. Dad was finishing his grilled cheese. He looked up at me, and I think he knew. He always knew.

“Dad,” I said. “Who is Irene Moss?”

He set the sandwich down. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and folded the napkin, slow, in half and in half again.

“She’s a friend,” he said.

“Dad.”

“It isn’t mine to tell, Dana,” he said. “It’s hers. I gave my word on it a long time ago.”

He would not say another thing about it, that night or all that week. And my father is a man who has never in his life broken his word, so I didn’t push him. I knew better.

The fifth Sunday

The next Sunday I did the batteries first, before Dad even got his coat off. I read Clarence the markets. I unwrapped Doris’s butterscotch. I let Marvin cheat me out of two hands of pitch.

Then Dad dozed off in the vinyl chair by the window with his chin on his chest, the way he does now in the afternoons, and I stood up and went over to Irene’s chair.

She had been watching me all afternoon. I think she had known I was coming since I walked in the door.

“Why can’t Craig know?” I asked her.

She didn’t pretend not to understand me. She looked across at Dad, asleep in his chair, for a long minute. Then she reached over and opened the drawer of the little table beside her.

She took out a school picture, the old kind they took in the gym with the blue swirled backdrop, worn soft at the corners.

A boy about nine years old, grinning, with one front tooth missing.

My brother.

“Pull up a chair, honey,” Irene said. “Your dad was never going to tell you this, and I promised him I wouldn’t either. But I’m eighty-four, and I think I’ve kept it long enough.”