What Josie Said
Josie came Friday night.
I did not call her. She was standing on my porch at nine o’clock, and I knew her by the knock, three soft ones and then one, as she has knocked since she was six.
She is twenty-two, a veterinary technician at the animal clinic on Route 11, and the best thing anyone in my family has made in forty years. She sat down beside me on the porch steps, the way she did when she was small.
“Grandpa,” she said. “Mrs. Strawser called me. She did not tell me anything. She only asked me to come.” She took my hand. “I already knew something was wrong. I did not know it was your money. I swear it.”
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She told me. In March of last year Brandt Homes, the developer in Lewistown, went into bankruptcy owing her father ninety-one thousand dollars for four months of excavating on a subdivision that never got built.
He had already paid his crew and bought the fuel. The note on the Mack truck was eighteen hundred forty dollars a month, and he had eleven men depending on him, and he had not slept in a week.
“He did not tell Mom,” Josie said. “She thought it was a slow winter. I saw it by accident. I borrowed his truck in June and there was a letter from the bank in the visor. It said repossession.”
“What did you do?”
“I put it back.” She was crying. “I never said a word, and I am so sorry. I thought he was getting through it.”
I put my arm around her.
“There is something else,” she said. “He sits at the end of your lane before every visit. I have seen him from the road. He parks at the mailbox with the engine off, and he sits there twenty minutes, and then he comes up to the house whistling.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. “I think it is the hardest thing he does all week.”
The crickets had mostly quit for the season, and the porch light buzzed.
I thought about a boy of seven on a milk crate in the feed room of my barn, reading me the tickets off the feed truck because my glasses were in the house. He read each one aloud with great pride. “Dairy ration, forty bags, Dad. Two ten a ton.” He never got one wrong.
“Josie,” I said. “If I asked your father to stand up in front of people and say what he did, could you sit beside me while he did?”
She was quiet so long I thought she would say no. I would have understood.
“Yes,” she said. “I would rather be next to you than anywhere.”