The Plate I Asked Her to Hang

Where Scott Stood

I have to say this part plain, because it is the thing people always ask me. Why did I not just call the tax office. Why did I not report her for taking our money.

Because she was Scott’s mother. Because what she had done had a soft name. A clerical error. A wrong account pulled by a program.

I could not prove it was not that. And even if I could, it would mean sitting across a desk from a federal man and swearing out fraud against the woman who held Scott’s face the day he was born.

That is not a phone call. That is a thing you cannot ever take back once it is said.

And because Scott asked me not to.

He did not defend what she did. I need that understood. He sat on the edge of our bed with his elbows on his knees and his big hands hanging down between them.

“Amber, if we file on her, she could lose the house,” he said. “Daddy could lose the house over it. It is still fraud even when it is your own mama.”

His voice broke on the word mama. He is not a man who cries, and he was close to it. “Let me handle it at home. Let me talk to her. Please. For me.”

I loved him too much to make him choose out loud, in words, between his wife and his mother. So I said all right. We would keep it in the family.

But keeping it in the family, I was learning, meant Donna rocking on her new porch while I taped off a nursery I could not afford to fill.

It meant Scott driving over there twice and coming back with his jaw set and nothing fixed. It meant me returning the glider to the store in Cleveland and telling the boy we had changed our minds.

“She says it is done and we should let it lie,” he told me after the second trip. He would not look at me. “She says bringing it up again is just you being bitter.”

“Did you tell her it was the nursery,” I said.

“I told her.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “She said a baby does not know the difference between new paint and old. She is not wrong about the baby, Amber. She is wrong about everything else.”

That was the closest Scott came, in those weeks, to standing with me. It was not enough and we both knew it, but I held onto it.

I was not bitter. I was eleven weeks along and getting bigger every week, and I was quiet. Quiet is a different animal than fine. I had learned that too.

That was the week I stopped waiting on Scott to fix it, and started thinking about what I could do with my own two hands and twenty-two dollars.