The Payment Book Beside the Pie

The car wash

I married Steve Kuhn fourteen years ago this past June.

I was thirty-eight and he was forty-six, and we were both old enough to know that love does not pay the electric bill, which is maybe why we were so careful at first.

He had been divorced six years by then. He had the house on Maple Street in Nappanee, a little two-story with a deep porch, and he had his job at the motor home plant over in Elkhart, where he had worked since he was twenty-two.

He also had two grown kids who were not sure what to make of me.

Brent was sixteen when we married and mostly just wanted to know if I could make tacos. Brittany was nineteen and wanted to know nothing about me at all.

I understood that. Her parents’ divorce had been loud and long, and her mother, Deb, had moved down to Fort Wayne with a lot of feelings about how it ended.

Some of those feelings landed on me, even though I met Steve two years after the papers were signed.

I worked then where I work now, in the billing office at the hospital in Goshen.

I spend my days on the phone with insurance companies, fighting over codes and denials and the price of a bag of saline. It is not glamorous, but it is steady, and it has a pension.

For a year we were fine. More than fine. Steve had put money away every paycheck since his twenties. He was proud of that number.

He did not tell me what it was, and I did not ask, but I could see it in how he stood.

Then in the summer of 2013, a man he had known at the plant for twenty years came to him about a car wash.

Not a little coin-op. A big automatic one out on the highway in Goshen, with the brushes and the colored foam and monthly memberships.

The man, whose name I will not say even now, had the numbers all drawn up on a legal pad. He needed partners.

He said Steve would double his money in five years. He said it was a sure thing, because people in Indiana will always have salt on their cars.

Steve pulled seventy-four thousand dollars out of his 401(k) to go in on it. He did not ask me first.

He told me later that he wanted it to be a surprise, that he pictured the day he would come home and tell me we could retire early and drive out to see the Grand Canyon.

The car wash opened in October. By the next August it was padlocked.

The partner had borrowed against it twice without telling anybody, and when it went under, the bank took the building and the equipment and there was nothing at all left over.

The night he told me

He did not tell me right away. He carried it for most of a month. I knew something was wrong because he stopped eating supper, and Steve has never in his life skipped supper.

He told me on a Tuesday night in September at the kitchen table.

He had his reading glasses on and a stack of papers in front of him, and he could not make himself look up at me while he talked.

“It’s gone, Val,” he said. “All of it. And it’s worse than gone, because I took it out early, and I owe taxes and a penalty on every dollar.”

I asked him how much the penalty was. He told me. It was a number that made my stomach drop, on top of the number that was already gone.

“I can’t make the house payment and that both,” he said. “Not on what the plant pays. I’ve run it every way there is.”

I remember I put my hand on top of his on the table. His knuckles were cold.

He had worked with his hands his whole life, and they were rough and thick, and they were shaking.

“Then I’ll make the house payment,” I said.

He shook his head. “That’s my house. I bought that house. I don’t want you paying for a house that’s got my name on it and Deb’s name on the old deed.”

“It’s our house,” I said. “I live in it. I’ll pay for it.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he said the thing that set the next twelve years in stone.

“Don’t tell the kids,” he said. “Please. Not Brent and not Brittany. I can’t have them know their dad was that big a fool. I can’t have Deb know. She’d tell everybody in Allen County by Sunday.”

I told him he was not a fool. I told him he had trusted a friend, and that was not the same thing.

But I promised, because he asked me, and because a man’s pride is not something you hand back to him with a lecture.