The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

His Own Handwriting

She did not believe me. I would not have believed me either.

A strange older woman slides down next to you at a ballgame and tells you the man you are counting on robbed another woman to play Santa Claus for your kids. You would think she was crazy or jealous or both.

So I did not argue. I took the folded notebook paper out of my coat pocket.

I opened it against my knee and held it where the lights could hit it. I let Rick’s own handwriting do the talking.

She read it. I watched her eyes go across it twice.

The date. The three thousand five hundred dollars. The words, for the transmission on my truck.

His whole name signed at the bottom in that blocky hand she knew as well as I did. She had surely gotten notes from him too.

“That’s his writing,” she said. It was not a question.

“That’s his writing. He borrowed this for a transmission in July and never fixed the truck. You’ve ridden in it. It still grinds into second, doesn’t it.”

She let out a sound that was half a laugh and half something with no bottom to it. “It dies at the four-way,” she said. “Every time. He says the shop’s backed up.”

“The shop never saw a dime of it,” I said. “The farm store saw it. You did, and your babies did. I don’t hold that against them for one second.”

“But I thought you ought to know whose thirty years they were jumping on.”

For a long minute she just held the paper and looked at it. She read the amount again, her lips moving over the number like she was making it real.

“Three thousand five hundred,” she said. “He told me his aunt left him a little. Said that’s how he could do for us this fall.”

“There’s no aunt,” I said. “There’s a plant pension and a woman who trusted him. That’s the whole aunt.”

Down on the field the Eagles scored and the whole home side came to its feet and roared. The band played the fight song.

The two of us sat still in the middle of all that noise like two rocks in a creek.

Then Tammy laughed for real. It came up out of her sudden and surprised, the laugh of a woman who has just set down something she did not know she was carrying.

“He parked that truck at my place every Sunday,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Told me he was saving up to get it fixed right. Saving up. Lord have mercy.”

“He had already spent the fixing money on my kids’ Christmas in September.”