The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

You Signed Every One of Them

I went to Darren’s shop on Sunday afternoon after church, in Delmar’s truck. Delmar stayed in the cab with the window down.

The shop on Route 274 smells of diesel and hydraulic oil and coffee that has sat on the burner since morning. It was the smell of my son’s whole life, and I stood in the door of it with my cane and could not tell where he was.

“Dad?” The desk chair rolled back. “What are you doing out here? Is everything all right?”

“Sit down, Darren.”

He did not sit. He was standing, I think, with his arms folded. He has stood that way since he was nine.

“I was at the bank on Tuesday,” I said. “Pauline Strawser read me my own account. Josie came Friday and told me about Brandt Homes. I know about the loan on the truck and I know about the crew. I know you did not spend it on yourself.”

A compressor kicked on somewhere in the back, and then it quit.

“I did not bring the sheriff,” I said. “I brought one question. I want you to tell me what you did.”

I waited. I would have waited all afternoon. I gave him a minute, then two, because I wanted him to have the chance, and I have thought about those two minutes every day since.

“Dad,” my son said, and his voice was perfectly level. “You signed every one of them.”

I did not move.

“You were sitting at your own table. I read you the checks and you signed. Nobody put a gun to your head.” He gave a short laugh with no air in it. “You cannot even see the checks. Who else was going to do it? You would be in a home in Newport by now, eating off a tray.”

He said it the way you read a weather report. That is what I carry. It was not hot. It was cold and calm and true, because I had signed every one of them.

I did not raise my voice. I have never had to.

“The co-op dinner is the second Saturday of November,” I said. “Roscoe put your name on the slate for my old seat on the board. You told me last spring it was the thing you wanted most in this world.”

“It is.”

“You will be there, at your table, with Tricia and your crew. And before they vote, I am going to ask you one thing in front of everybody.”

“What?”

“I am going to ask you to read me something.”

He did not answer. I found the door frame with my cane and walked out into the sun.

Delmar started the truck without a word. Halfway down the lane he reached across and set a hand on my knee, and left it there until we turned onto the road.

Three Weeks

I will not tell you the three weeks were easy.

The co-op board met that very night in the back room of the feed mill and voted four to nothing, with two members phoning in their yes from their kitchens. The check for four thousand two hundred twelve dollars came to my door on Tuesday by Roscoe’s own hand. I paid the school tax that afternoon, and Pauline drove out and watched me sign it.

She also opened a new account in my name alone, with Josie as a trusted contact, so the bank would call Josie if anything unusual happened. She mailed my statements in large print to my own box at the end of the lane.

Darren came every Friday. He came up the lane whistling, as he always had, and he did not say a word about the checkbook, which Pauline had taken away. He fixed a hinge on the barn door. He sat an hour and ate Josie’s soup.

I could hear what it cost him, in the whistling, thin and a little off the note.

Three Fridays I watched my son work at not telling me, and I almost gave in. I almost took his hand and said, Darren, it is over, we will say no more.

But I thought about sixty-one lines. I thought about Gail at the pharmacy counter and the forty-one steps across Main Street, and a man at the end of my lane who parked and sat twenty minutes and never turned the key and drove away.

The Friday before the dinner Tricia came up the lane alone. She stood in my kitchen with her purse in both hands, and I could hear she had been crying in the car.

“I did not know,” she said. “Lloyd, I swear before God. I thought the line of credit was real. Is he going to tell them?”

“I do not know. I have asked him a question. He will answer it or he will not.”

She set a jar on my table. It was her apple butter, the kind she makes every October.

“I will sit with him either way,” she said. “He is my husband.”

I told her I would not have thought less of her for it.