One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

When Noah was born, Dad drove to the bank and opened a College Savings Iowa account with Noah’s name on it as the beneficiary.

When Maddie came along he opened another, and then one for Sam.

He put in what he could. Some years it was a few hundred dollars. Good harvest years it was a few thousand. He took the state tax deduction and he never missed a year.

Nineteen years of that came to ninety-six thousand dollars, all told, across three accounts.

Noah had already used part of his for his first year at Kirkwood, where he was in the ag program, commuting thirty-some miles to Cedar Rapids in a truck with two hundred thousand miles on it.

Somehow, that winter, Greg heard the number. Maddie mentioned it at his kitchen table while she was looking at college brochures.

He did his division on the back of a business card, and he came to my driveway.

I drove out to the farm that night after supper.

Mom was doing dishes and Dad was in his recliner with the farm report on, and when I told them, Mom set down the dish towel and sat at the table without a word.

Dad turned the television off, which he almost never does.

“He wants a quarter,” I said. “Twenty-four thousand. For Colton.”

Dad was quiet for a long time. He rubbed his thumb across the arm of the chair where the fabric had worn shiny.

“Well,” he said finally, “it’s in my name. It stays in my name. And it’s for those three. That was the promise when we started it, and I don’t break promises I made over a crib.”

“He said he might talk to a lawyer,” I said.

“Let him,” Dad said. “A lawyer can read. The paper says Walter Haverkamp, owner. There’s nothing for anybody to split. You don’t need to lose sleep over that part, Lynnie.”

So that settled the money in about a minute and a half. There was never a fight to have.

Every lawyer in Cedar County would have told Greg what my father did. The account wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t his.

But that wasn’t what kept me up that night. What kept me up was something Mom said while she walked me out to the car, her cardigan pulled tight against the wind.

“That poor little boy,” she said. “None of this is his doing.”

I knew Colton. That’s the part I haven’t told yet.

I’m the secretary at the elementary school in town, and I have been for fourteen years, and Colton Stoltz was in first grade in Mrs. Hughes’s room, down the hall to the left from my office.

Most mornings I saw him in the breakfast line. He was a small, quiet boy with a blond buzz cut and ears that stuck out a little, and he always said thank you for the ice pack without being told.

The first time he came in, the fall before, I had to sit very still at my desk for a minute after he left.

He had Greg’s chin. He had Noah’s chin, really, and Sam’s. I had looked at that chin across my own dinner table for nineteen years.

I had decided early on to be kind to him, because he was a child and kindness to children is the job.

But I kept a careful distance, too. I had never once said his last name out loud.

Two days after Greg came to my driveway, Colton came into the office holding his mouth.