One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

“Fortress,” Colton repeated, delighted. He looked at it like it was the best thing anybody had ever done for him. Maybe it was.

Maddie went back to her own plate, but I saw the corner of her mouth, and I saw her look at him twice more during that meal when she thought nobody was watching.

He ate two helpings of chicken and three rolls. Dad told him about the time a calf got loose in the church parking lot in 1971, which is a story Dad tells to everybody under twelve.

We were halfway through the second round of rolls when I heard the truck. I knew the sound of it.

I’d heard it in my driveway for nineteen years and then once, six weeks before, with a business card in the driver’s shirt pocket. It was about a quarter after two. Greg was early.

I got up and went to the kitchen door. He was coming up the walk with his hands in his jacket pockets, his head down, and when he looked up and saw me in the doorway, he stopped on the sidewalk.

Krista had told him where his son was. She had not told him what he would find.

“He’s still eating,” I said. “Come on in. There’s coffee.”

He came in and stood just inside the back door, on the rag rug Mom braided when I was in high school. From there he could see straight into the dining room.

He saw Colton between Noah and Maddie. He saw Maddie reach across and pass the little boy the basket of rolls, and he saw Colton take one and say thank you, and he saw Noah lean down and say something that made the boy laugh so hard he had to put his roll down.

He saw my father at the head of the table, who looked up, and looked at Greg for a long, steady moment, and then went back to carving the chicken.

Greg didn’t say anything. His face did something I had never seen it do in nineteen years of marriage.

It was shame, the deep kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere underneath a person.

I poured him a cup of coffee and set it on the counter by the phone. That was where I had left the bank book. I hadn’t planned it.

I’d just set it there that morning with my purse, meaning to show it to Krista when she dropped him off, and then I’d forgotten in all the business with the drawing.

Greg looked down at the counter when I set the cup there, and he saw it. The little blue savings register with the bank’s name on the cover. He picked it up.

He opened it to the first page. I watched his eyes go across the line that said Colton James Stoltz, and then down to the line that said Custodian, and then down to the deposits.

There were two lines by then. The first twenty-five in cash, and the first transfer on the first of April.

Fifty dollars total. It was so little. It was nothing, against twenty-four thousand. I watched him read it twice.

“What is this,” he said. It wasn’t a question, exactly. His voice was very quiet.

“It’s his,” I said. “Twenty-five dollars a month, out of my check. I opened it at the bank on Cedar Street. It’s in his name. I can’t take it back. It isn’t much, Greg. It’s what I could do.”