The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

The Last Day of the Month

The truck sold on Thursday to a gravel outfit in Newport for thirty-one thousand dollars. Pauline Strawser stood in the bank lobby on Friday morning and watched the cashier’s check go into my account. She put her hand over mine on the counter and did not say anything.

That left thirty-two thousand, seven hundred forty dollars, which my son has paid back at about twelve hundred sixty a month. Delmar’s pond took Darren and Tyler and one skid steer four days in the frost, and they dug it in a straight line. Delmar sent a pound cake to the shop with the first half of the check.

It has been fourteen months as I tell this. There is about fifteen thousand dollars left.

Darren still drives me to Harrisburg every six weeks for the needle. We do not speak much on Route 11. Some mornings I hear him clear his throat as if he will begin, and then he does not, and I have learned to let that be.

But last spring, somewhere past Duncannon, he began to read the road signs aloud.

I do not think he decided to. It came out of him the way it did at seven. “Mile marker forty-one. Weigh station, one mile. Susquehanna River, Dad, and it is high.”

I did not tell him I could not see the river. I did not need to.

Josie moved into the little room off my kitchen in January, to be near the clinic, she said, and I have not asked whether it was only that. Tricia sends apple butter and does not stay long. She has not forgiven the checkbook, but she has not left my son either, and those are two different things she is carrying.

The green ledger sits on the kitchen shelf. Josie reads me a page of it on Sunday nights, Marjorie’s blue ink in every line. Last week she found a line inside the front cover that none of us had ever read, dated February of 1989, the winter of the bad milk prices, when I would not go to the bank for a loan.

“Lloyd, if you ever cannot do this, ask somebody. Do not be proud.”

I sat a long time after that, thinking of all the times I could have asked somebody and had not.

On the last day of every month Darren comes up the lane with the check in his shirt pocket, and he does not park at the mailbox anymore. He drives straight to the porch.

He sits across the table from me and reads the check aloud, the name, the number, the amount, and I run my thumb along the edge of it and tell him to read it a second time.

He reads it a second time.

That is how a man of seventy-nine forgave his son, if you want to call it that. It did not happen in a courtroom. It happened with a pound cake, a check read twice, and a hundred and forty people in a fire hall who would not look away.

I still say the forty-one steps to myself. I do not count them with fear now. I count them the way Marjorie counted dollars, to know where I stand.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.