The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

So I made the joke turn. Instead of the joke being on me, I made it about her. I made her the one who needed it. I made myself the one who was doing a favor. It took me about four seconds and it was the cruelest thing I have ever said, and it worked. They laughed. The whole table roared.

I was proud of it for exactly as long as it took to drive home. By supper I could not stand to look at my own hands.

I did not stop eating her dinners. That is the worst part. I want you to know that, so you do not think I am better than I am. The next day I went over at noon like nothing was wrong, and I sat in Carlin’s chair that faces the window, and I said grace over her roast, and I ate two helpings, and I told her it was the best I had ever had. She passed me the rolls. She was perfectly kind. I thought, she doesn’t know. I thought, I got away with it.

She knew. She knew right then. She sat across from me and passed me the rolls anyway, and I did not understand until I had the plate in my truck that I had been served my last supper at that table by a woman who was giving me one more chance to say it to her face.

What the Money Was For

Now I have to tell you about my brother.

Bertram Plackett is seventy-seven. He is the oldest of us; I am the baby of the family, and Bert practically raised me. When Dad died in 1964, I was twelve and Bert was fifteen, and Bert quit school to run the place and put me through on a diet of fried bologna and hard work. He is the finest man I have ever known. He has vascular dementia, and he has had it going on six years.

You can already do the arithmetic. Thora died in October of 2020. Bert was diagnosed the following spring. He had been living alone out by the creek, and one night in June he walked out in his sock feet and the sheriff found him two miles down the county road, sitting on a culvert, waiting for a bus to the Army. He has not been in the Army since 1969.

I put him in Maple Terrace, the care home in Marlow, that same week. It is clean, and the aides are good, and the room costs what the state will pay and what his Social Security will pay. But the room the state pays for is on the north side, with no window to speak of, and a roommate who screams. There is a room with a window on the south side, where he can see a cottonwood and the road. It costs three hundred and forty dollars more a month. I walked into that office, and I looked at the woman with the clipboard, and I said, “I’ll find it.”