The Graduation Check He Took Back

The check he tried to give back

The first week of March he came to our house.

He had never once in twenty-three years come out to our place without calling, and he drove out on a Tuesday evening after supper and pulled in the driveway and just sat in his truck.

Nadia went out. I watched from the porch door. It was getting dark, and the yard light had come on, and I could see them standing beside the truck.

Silas held out an envelope. I knew which envelope it was before I could see it. It was the same one from the parking lot, a little bent at the corner now.

Nadia did not take it.

“Not yet, Grandpa,” she said. I heard her clear across the yard. She was not mean about it. She said it the way Olive used to tell him his coffee was too hot to drink.

“It’s yours,” he said. “I wrote it to you. It’s no good to me.”

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t want it because you feel bad. I want it when you mean it about the school. Not before.”

He stood there holding it. Then he put it back in his shirt pocket and nodded once, like a man who’s been told a fair price, and got back in his truck and drove home.

That was the consequence, if you want to call it that. He had money he couldn’t spend and a granddaughter he couldn’t buy. He had a whole town that had seen him take it back.

And he had to sit in Olive’s chair every month and feel her good hands on his head, knowing what he’d said about them.

The phone call at school

The third week of March, Nadia came home from school and stood at the bottom of the porch steps with her bag still on her shoulder. She had a funny look on her face.

“My instructor pulled me aside on the clinic floor today,” she said. “Mrs. Albright. She said a man called the front desk and booked three senior cuts for Thursday. All three at the same time. All three in my chair.”

“Who?”

“She said he wouldn’t leave a last name. He said they were friends of a friend.” Nadia put her bag down. “Mom. Senior cuts are ten dollars. Who drives forty minutes for a ten dollar haircut from a student?”

I had a pretty good idea. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to be wrong in front of her.

“I guess we’ll see Thursday,” I said.

I took the day off. I told my sub it was a family thing, which it was.

I drove to Columbus at noon and sat in the beauty school parking lot in my own car, two rows back from the door, and waited like a private detective.