The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
I opened the sack. Two sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, and an apple, and a can of pop. He had cut the sandwiches corner to corner, the way Daddy always cut them.
“When you came by,” Craig said, “Walt Hanson stood up. Did you see that?”
“I saw him raise his cup.”
“He stood up first. I don’t think you could see. He stood up from that booth and he raised his cup, and then Dale Peterson did too, and the guy who runs the elevator, and pretty soon the whole front of the café was standing up while you went by on Harold’s tractor.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I looked at the sandwich in my hand.
“Nobody even looked at me,” Craig said. “They didn’t know I was there. And I sat in that booth and I thought, every one of those men is standing up for her, and I’m the man who did this to her.”
He was quiet for a long while. A red-winged blackbird was going on and on in the shelterbelt behind us, the way they do in May.
“I went out to the truck,” he said. “I had a scratch ticket in the glove box from last week, and on the back there’s a phone number. The gambling helpline. I sat in the parking lot of the café and I called it.”
My hands went still on the wax paper.
“It was a woman,” he said. “She was very kind. She asked me how much I’d lost and I told her. I said the whole number out loud for the first time, Dana. Two hundred and ten thousand. And she didn’t gasp or anything. She just said, okay, Craig. Okay. Let’s talk about what you do today.”
His voice broke on that, and he stopped and looked at his hands.
“There’s a meeting in Sioux Falls on Tuesday nights. Gamblers Anonymous, in a church basement on the west side. Tonight’s the first one I can go to. She gave me the address, and a man’s name to call who goes.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I’m going to go.” He looked at me then. “And I called the lot and told them I’m not coming in today, and maybe they’ll let me go for it, and if they do, they do. And then I drove home and deleted every app off my phone, and I made you sandwiches, because I didn’t know what else to bring.”
I want to tell you I forgave him right there on the tailgate. I didn’t.
That would make a nicer story, maybe, but it wouldn’t be true to how a heart actually works after something like this.
What I did was eat one of the sandwiches. I was hungry, and they were good, and he’d put the mustard on both slices the way Daddy liked.
Craig watched me eat it like it was the most important thing he had ever seen.
“I’m not signing anything,” I said when I was done.
“Not now and not later. The eighty stays mine, and what it makes stays mine. That’s not to hurt you. That’s just how it has to be.”
“I know,” he said. “I wouldn’t let me either.”
“And the house money is gone. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Daddy wanted us in a house, and we’re going to be renting for a long time because of what you did.”