The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

The kitchen table

Rick came to my door on Monday at seven in the morning, before I had finished the dishes. He had not shaved. He was wearing the same shirt. He stood on the step with an envelope in both hands, and I will tell you the truth, I almost shut the door.

Then I said, “Come in before you catch cold.”

He sat in the chair he had sat in for fifty years, and I poured him coffee because I did not know what else to do.

“I brought all of it,” he said. “Eighty-four hundred, in cash. I borrowed the half I’d spent from Jolene’s mother, and I told Jolene Saturday night.” He swallowed. “She’s staying with her sister in Hugo for a while.”

He pushed the envelope across the table, and it sat there between the sugar bowl and the salt. “You want to know why.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

He turned his cup around in its saucer. “The school district pulled their contract in March. Eleven years of that business, and a third of my income gone in one letter. Then Cody’s wedding in June, and I’d promised him the whole thing before any of this.

Nineteen thousand dollars. I took a second mortgage on the office and told Jolene it was a line of credit.”

He looked at me for the first time.

“And Walt died, and everybody said you were going to Pam’s, and I thought, thirty years. Thirty years I did that man’s books and never sent a bill, and nobody ever said thank you in dollars. I sat in that hospital in Paris. I drove those papers. I thought, she’s going to sell anyway, and somebody ought to be paid for it.” He stopped.

“I knew it was wrong standing at that counter. Kayla looked at me and I knew she knew. I told myself I’d put it back by Christmas, and then it was a year. I was already living in a thing I couldn’t get out of.”

I let that sit. I am not a woman who rushes a thing like that.

“Walt said thank you in tomatoes and venison,” I said. “He thought that was what it was. If you’d wanted cash, Rick, you could have asked. He would have handed you a thousand dollars that afternoon and called it too little.”

My cousin put his face in his hands and cried, that big loud man who never met a stranger. I let him. I set the pecan pie in front of him and sat across with my own cup, and I waited.

When he was done, I said what I had been working out for ten nights.

“That envelope is not mine. The club is making me whole, Curtis is writing the check this morning. That money is the club’s, and you will carry it to Curtis yourself, standing up. You will not hunt my timber again, not this year and maybe not ever, and that is Otis’s to say, not mine.

I am not going to the county attorney, because Aunt Verna would want to know why, and she will not hear it from a stranger. You will drive to Hugo this week and sit by her bed and tell her. What Jolene decides is between the two of you.”

He nodded without looking up.

“Thanksgiving is here at noon, same as always. Not for you. For Jolene and the children. You can bring the rolls if she says you can. And Rick, do not ever put pencil on a card with my name on it again.”

“No, Dee.”