The Check I Framed Over Her Chair

“You just did,” I said. “Most of it.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’ve been paying for it every Sunday for a month. I’d like to stop paying for my mistake.” She put her hand flat on the frame. “And start paying for something that’s worth it.”

Nobody said anything.

“Mr. Pruitt is going to sell this place,” she said. “He told me in April. He’s not coming back from town, and his kids don’t want it. I was going to list it this fall.”

She looked at Emmett, then at me. “I’d like to help you two buy it. The down payment. Whatever it takes. Not as a check to Carly. As a gift to both of you, in writing, with my name on it and the truth on it.”

Emmett looked at me. He was leaving it to me. I loved him so much for that.

I looked at the frame under her hand. The fold line. Her neat signature. My name.

“I’d like that,” I said. “On one condition.”

“Anything.”

“You come to Sunday dinner without your checkbook,” I said. “Every week. And you sit in your chair.”

Delphine laughed then, finally, a small wet laugh that turned into something else. She put her hand over her mouth. Wendell reached over and put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him and cried for a minute, right there at my kitchen table, with the fried chicken getting cold.

I got up and got her a glass of tea. I set it down next to her plate.

“Thank you, honey,” she said. It was the first time she ever called me that.

We did buy the farmhouse. The bank said yes in August, and it still took until October to close, because nothing ever goes fast with a bank. Delphine handled the whole thing herself and would not take a dime of commission.

The lender wanted a gift letter for the down payment, the kind that says the money is a gift and not a loan and nobody expects it back. Delphine wrote it out at our kitchen table in her neat, looping hand.

She read it out loud before she signed it. It said the money was a gift to her son and her daughter-in-law, with no repayment expected, ever. Then, under her signature, where nobody had asked her to, she wrote one more line.

For the girl who did not have a price.

The lender’s office called and asked whether she needed to redo it without the extra line. Delphine told them no, she did not, and that she would be happy to explain it to anybody who asked.

As for the frame, I asked her what she wanted me to do with it.

“I’m keeping it,” she said. “In my desk at the office. Face up.” She tucked it into her big purse. “Every time I think I’ve got somebody figured out, I’m going to open that drawer.”

I found out I was expecting at the end of August, the same week the bank said yes. Emmett cried in the bathroom doorway. I called my mother first and Delphine second, and Delphine drove out that same night with a casserole I did not need and stood in my kitchen holding both my hands.