Why I Said No
“There is a number I can call,” Pauline said after a while, more quietly. “The county Area Agency on Aging has a protective services line, and the district attorney has a man who handles exactly this.” She stopped. “It is a crime, Lloyd. I will make that call tomorrow morning if you tell me to.”
I sat with my hands around a coffee cup I could not see.
Everyone who has heard this story since has asked why I said no, and I will tell you what I told Pauline.
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“No,” I said. “Not that call.”
“Lloyd.”
“I have a son who is fifty-one years old and a granddaughter who is twenty-two. I have a wife in the Zion Lutheran cemetery with a stone that has my name on it too, and a space waiting beside her.”
I heard her breathing.
“If I make that call, my son’s name goes in the Courier’s court column, on the same page as the church supper. A judge gives me a paper that says he owes me sixty-three thousand dollars. A man with a loan on a dump truck has nothing to pay it with. So I will have a paper and no son.”
“And Josie has a father with a record,” Pauline said softly.
“And Josie has a father with a record. And Tricia works the lunch line at the elementary school.”
“So what do you want?”
I had not known until she asked. I said it before I knew I was going to.
“I want him to say it out loud,” I said. “To me. To somebody who matters to him. I do not want him in a courtroom. I want him in a room where it costs him something to tell the truth.”
Pauline did not answer for a long time.
“Then you had better decide who is in the room,” she said.