The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

Darren

Darren is fifty-one. He is my only son and the only one of my children who stayed. My daughter Sandra calls from Arizona every Sunday at four, and she means every word, but she is two thousand miles away.

Darren runs Eshelman Excavating out of a steel shop on Route 274. He digs basements, ponds, farm lanes, and septic fields with a backhoe, an excavator, and a Mack dump truck. He and his wife Tricia live two miles down the road, and their daughter Josie is my only grandchild. He worked for me every summer of his boyhood, which is how I know how hard he can work.

He drove me to the eye doctor in Harrisburg, fifty-four miles each way, and sat in the waiting room three hours. He brought groceries on Fridays. He fixed the porch light. You cannot know what it is to lose your wife and your eyes and still have a son walk in every Friday whistling.

When he said he would handle the checkbook, something in my chest let go. I thought it was gratitude. I know now it was relief, which is not the same thing, and it is why I never asked a single question.

He bought me a plastic card the size of a bookmark with a slot cut in it. You lay it over the check and the slot shows you where to sign.

Every month Darren sat at my kitchen table with the bills spread out and read each one aloud in his flat, patient voice.

“Electric, ninety-one dollars. Propane, two hundred and ten. Supplement insurance, a hundred and sixty.”

I signed where the slot was. I told myself that was what trust was. I understand now it was only the sound of his voice.

The Number

Pauline did not make me wait.

She set the coffee in front of me, and I could smell it, and I could not drink it. She sat in the chair beside mine instead of behind her desk. That was when I knew it was worse than a mistake.

“Lloyd,” she said, “I am going to say a number, and then I am going to ask you not to say anything for a minute.”

“All right.”

“Nineteen months ago your savings account held sixty-four thousand, one hundred fifty-two dollars. This morning it holds four hundred twelve dollars and eighteen cents.”

I could hear the clock on her wall.

“Your checking account is at nineteen dollars,” she said. “Your card is tied to it. That is why it was declined at Bixler’s. There is a second card on that account, and Darren carries that one.”

“Then you knew,” I said.

“I knew in September,” Pauline said, and her voice shook, and I understood she had been carrying it a long time. “I want you to hear me say that, Lloyd.”

Here is what she told me.

Eighteen months before, the mailing address on my statements had been changed from my rural route to a post office box in Rexford. The request carried my signature, the one from the plastic card. It was a good signature, because it was mine.

After that the checks began. Nine hundred dollars to cash. Two thousand four hundred to Eshelman Excavating. Cash, cash, a check to the Mack dealer in Harrisburg. Cash from the machine outside the bank, four hundred dollars at a time, three and four times a week.

Sixty-one entries in all. She had printed every one on eleven pages, in print as large as her machine would make, though she knew I could not read even that.

“Why did you not tell me in September?” I was not angry. I wanted to know.

“Because I may not say a word of it to anyone but the account owner,” Pauline said, “and for nineteen months the account owner has not once walked into this building by himself.”

She was right. Darren had driven me to every errand for two years and waited in the truck with the engine running.

“I called your house twice, and Darren answered both times. I mailed you a letter, and it went to the post office box. I asked your son at the drive-up window in August if everything was all right with your finances. He looked me in the face and said, ‘Dad’s just generous, Mrs. Strawser, he likes to help me out.'”

I tried to picture it. Darren had never been a boy who lied. Somewhere in nineteen months he had learned how.