The Ticket She Marked Paid in Full

Why I Did Not Make the Call

Some people would have handled it differently a long time before that morning, and I know it.

Mitch and I have a collection agency we use maybe twice a year, for the rare account that goes bad and the man moves off to Arkansas without a word.

One phone call and Earl’s ticket would have been their problem.

But Earl is my mother’s husband. A collection letter would have come to their mailbox with both their names on the house.

Mama would have opened it at the kitchen table, the way she opens everything, with a butter knife.

I was not going to put my mother’s name on a collection letter. I was not going to make her choose between her husband and her daughter over a stack of mineral and fence posts.

And I could not tell Mama myself without it sounding like I was asking her to pay his bill.

She and Earl have been married thirty-six years. Their money is their business. I did not want it to become mine.

So for three years I had carried it. And it had sat in the drawer under the register, getting longer, and I had gotten quieter about it every month.

Mitch and I had talked about it two nights before, at the kitchen table, after I added it up for the fourth time.

“What do you want to do, Jo?” he asked. Mitch is forty-seven. He is not a big talker, and when he asks a question he waits for the whole answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I want him to quit charging. I don’t even care about the money anymore. I just want it to stop.”

He rubbed the back of his neck the way he does when he is figuring the cost of something. Then he said, “It’s your call. It’s your family. If you want to let it go, we’ll eat it.”

“It’s seven thousand dollars, Mitch.”

“I know what it is,” he said. “We’ll eat it. We’ve eaten worse. Just don’t let it keep growing.”

That was where things stood when Earl put his elbow on my counter that Saturday.

Mitch was gone on deliveries to a dairy two counties over, the way he is most Saturday mornings, and it was just me and the men.