That is the second thing I am going to ask you to understand. I did not know until the twenty-ninth of June, a Monday, when Ingrid called me from the back room of the hardware store at eleven at night and said she needed me to come, and I came, and she showed me the wholesaler’s letter. Her father had let the credit run, and run, and run. He had given away nearly as much as he sold. The wholesaler in Des Moines wanted forty-six hundred dollars by the tenth of August or they were going to cut off the store’s account, and without the account there was no store. The store had stood on Main Street since 1958. It was the last thing in Tamsen with a family name on it that was not a funeral home.
Soren had not told Marit. He had not told Ingrid. He had told nobody. He had been trying to dig out on his own, the way men of his kind do, with a worse and worse heart.
He died on the third of August, a Monday, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the store, with a box of hinges in his hands. Ingrid found him. I was the one who drove to the cooperative to get her mother.
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I will say only that the two weeks after were a blur of casseroles and flowers and a funeral at Tamsen Lutheran where my father stood at the back in his navy suit and shook my hand. I held on to it too long. I said, “Thanks for coming, Dad,” and I meant it more than anything I have ever said, and I thought: I have to tell him. And I did not tell him, because by then I had my own reasons to keep my mouth shut.
A week after the funeral, Soren’s lawyer, a tired, kind man from Fenner, read the will in the store’s back room. It left the building and the business to Marit and Ingrid, and a letter for me. In the letter, in a big slow hand, Soren said that he had no son, and that he was sorry for the mess he was leaving, and that he knew I would take care of both of them. He did not ask me to take the name. He did not ask me to do anything. I took the name because I wanted it. I wanted somebody to have been asked to carry me.
That is the truth about the name, and I have not been able to say it to my father.