One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

He kept looking at the book. Then he closed it and held it against his chest with both hands, the way you hold a hymnal, and he looked out the window over the sink at the yard, and he didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I sold one combine all winter,” he said finally. “One. Corn’s under four dollars and nobody’s buying anything. My commission check in February was eleven hundred dollars. I pay you support for Maddie and Sam, and I should, I’m not complaining about that. Krista’s hours got cut at the care center.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Nobody knows that.” He turned the book over in his hands.

“At Christmas he asked if he was going to college like Noah. I said sure, buddy. Then I lay awake all night because I don’t have a dime put away for him. And then I heard about Walt’s accounts, and I did the math in the dealership lot, and I thought, those three have everything. And he’s got me.”

He stopped, and his jaw worked. “I knew it wasn’t mine,” he said.

“I knew it when I wrote it down. I went after it anyway. I’m ashamed of it, Lynn. I’ve been ashamed of it every day for six weeks. I just didn’t know how to take it back.”

I could have said a lot of things then. I had a whole list of them, from six weeks of lying awake. I didn’t say any of them.

Through the doorway I could see Colton showing Sam the gap in his teeth, and I thought, that’s what this is about. Not Greg and me. That’s what this is about.

“Well,” I said, “you could come sit down. There’s pie.”

Before he could answer, my father came into the kitchen. He’d gotten up from the table without anyone noticing, which is a thing my father can do in spite of his knees.

He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room and looked at Greg, and at the bank book in Greg’s hands.

“Greg,” Dad said.

“Walt.” Greg straightened up a little. I saw him do it. “I owe you an apology. About the money. I had no business.”

“No,” Dad said, “you didn’t.” He let that sit there in the kitchen for a moment.

My father has never in his life raised his voice to anybody, and he didn’t need to now. Then he said, “When’s the boy’s birthday?”

Greg blinked. “June ninth. He’ll be eight.”

Dad nodded slowly. He turned around and called into the dining room, “Bev, put June ninth on the calendar. The boy’s birthday.”

Then to Greg, in exactly the same voice, “There’ll be a card. It’ll have a check in it. It goes in that book.”

He pointed at the bank book with one big finger. “Not in your pocket. In that book.”

“Yes, sir,” Greg said. I had never heard him call my father sir. Not once in nineteen years.

Just then Noah came through the kitchen with Colton right behind him, the little boy holding Noah’s belt loop.

Noah had his old football under his arm, the one from his junior year with the laces half worn off.

He stopped when he saw his father, and the two of them looked at each other.

“Dad,” Noah said.

“Hey, bud.”

“I’m going to show him how to throw a spiral,” Noah said. “Out back. If that’s okay.”

Greg swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s okay.”