The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

The IOU

Three months before that night, Rick had sat at my kitchen table with his coffee and his hat in his hand. He asked me for three thousand five hundred dollars.

He had been my boyfriend for three years. We met at the Co-op, of all places.

Me buying mineral tubs for my daddy’s few head of cattle, him buying fence staples. He had been easy to be around from the first.

Steady, I thought. A man who showed up.

The transmission in his old F-150 had finally let go out on the county road. The shop in town wanted thirty-two hundred to rebuild it, plus the tow and the fluids.

“I hate to even ask,” he said. He turned his coffee cup around and around on the oilcloth. “I’ll have it back to you by Thanksgiving, every dollar. You know I’m good for it.”

I did know it. Or I thought I did.

I had the money because I had worked thirty years at the plant and I did not spend on foolishness. Three thousand five hundred dollars was not nothing to me.

It was a water heater and a set of tires and a cushion against a bad month, all at once. But I loved the man.

So I went to the bank the next morning. The teller was a girl named Brenda whose mama I went to church with, and she counted it out to me in hundreds without a word about it.

I drove home with that envelope in my purse and set it on the seat beside me like it was a passenger. Then I counted it out again on the same oilcloth where he had asked.

Here is the part I am not ashamed of. The part that saved me later.

Before I handed it over, I slid a sheet of my grandson’s notebook paper across the table. I set a pen on top of it.

“Just write it down,” I said. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because that’s how my daddy always did it, and it kept friends being friends.”

Rick grinned at me like it was the sweetest thing. He wrote it out in his own blocky hand.

The date. The amount, three thousand five hundred dollars. The words for the transmission on my truck, to be paid back in full by Thanksgiving.

Then he signed his whole name, Rick, the way he signed a check.

I folded that paper and put it in the drawer with the rubber bands and the twist ties. I did not think about it again for a while.

I had no earthly idea I had just signed the thing that would undo him.