The Mail I Hid From My Best Friend

The Thirteenth

On Thursday, the thirteenth of August, at nine at night, I was in the garage with the second beer when my phone rang with a Grand Island number. I had not had a call from it in fourteen months.

“Dad,” Shaylee said, flat, as if it cost her.

She was twenty-nine, with a five-year-old, Gus, a second-shift job and a husband who had left in the spring. She was two months behind on rent, and she needed nineteen hundred dollars by Monday’s hearing or the sheriff would carry her things down the stairs.

“I wouldn’t ask you,” she said. “I’ve asked everyone. I can’t put him in a motel, Dad. He’s five.”

“How much?” I said.

“Nineteen hundred.” She was crying, or trying not to. I know that sound from the other side. “I’ll pay you back. I swear to God.”

“Don’t cry. I’ll fix it.”

I had thirty-one dollars in my wallet.

I want to be exact about what I did next. I did not decide to steal from Kelvin Dunphy. I decided to be a father. For the first time in six years a person had said Dad to me and meant it, and I lay on the couch with the television off and did arithmetic. If the tire shop in Harbison gave me hours, I could put back a third by the end of the month and the rest by Christmas, and no one would be the wiser.

At ten past seven the next morning I came into the kitchen with my coffee, and Kelvin was counting hundreds into a bank envelope.

“Truck insurance,” he said. “Semiannual. Cecile likes cash. Run it up to Strickler’s for me? I’m running early. I’ve got a load coming in.”

He held it out. He did not even look at me. I have thought about that more than any other moment in this story. He held out nineteen hundred dollars and did not look, because he never had to.

Nineteen hundred. Exactly her number.

I put it in my shirt pocket and said, “Consider it paid.”

A parts driver from the tire shop gave me a ride to Grand Island that noon. I met Shaylee on a bench outside the laundry room of her building. Her boy sat on the step with a plastic dump truck, looking at me as if I were something the truck might hit. She counted the envelope with her lips moving, the way her grandmother did.

“Where did you get this?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m working.” It was nearly true.

She put her arms around my neck, a stiff hug, the kind you give a man you are not sure of. I stood there with my hands at my sides and thought: well, that was worth it.

That was the sin, in the end. Not the taking. The thought. A man deciding his friend’s trust could be spent like cash.

The Machine in the Hallway

The first message was Wednesday, the nineteenth of August, on the Dunphys’ answering machine in the hall. “Mr. Dunphy, this is Cecile Strickler. I don’t have your August payment on the account. Could you give me a call?” I stood with my thumb over the button, and I pressed delete.

You should know how fast a lie compounds. On the seventeenth I still had a plan. By the nineteenth the tire shop had given me eleven hours, not thirty, and the honest thing cost nothing but a conversation. He would have said, you’re a damn fool, and paid it, and taken it out of me slowly for a year with one raised eyebrow at the supper table.

I could not stand the eyebrow. That is the truth. Not the money. I could not be the man in that kitchen, in front of Em, who had to be forgiven.

On the twenty-fifth I deleted the second message. On the twenty-sixth a window envelope from Strickler’s came for Kelvin and I put it in the sack. By September it held the cancellation notice, a second notice, a slip for a certified letter I never picked up, a county tax statement and a birthday card from his sister in Tucson. It was where anything with a window in it went.

On Tuesday the fifteenth of September, Kelvin tapped a school district pickup in the lot at the elevator. Nobody was hurt. The deputy ran the plate. I heard it at noon from a man at the tire shop, and I walked out behind the shop and said aloud to a stray cat, “That’s it.”