The Guardianship Papers on My Table

“I did not ask what you deserve. I asked whether you’ll bring every paper.”

He nodded.

“Before you go, you will tell Eloy and Lonnie and Bernie and Pastor Gil what you did, to their faces, not on the telephone. You will tell Ruben Trujillo you’re sorry he had to be the one to hand it to me. And you will pay the visitor’s fee and the court costs, because it was your petition. Not me and not the state.”

“I will. All of it.”

A man should feel the weight of what he filed. The three thousand dollars he had put down at Sandia Gardens never came back, and the retainer to the Albuquerque firm was nine thousand. It cost him, and it ought to have.

He sat down on the bench by the guest book and I sat beside him. We looked at the pages, thick with names in blue and black ink, schoolchildren’s handwriting, an X from an old man who could not write, with someone else’s printing underneath.

“A hundred and seventy-one,” Kurt read from the last page, where Eloy’s granddaughter had added them up. He shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t have counted that many people who’d do that for me.”

“You could have,” I said. “You still can. That is rather the point.”

The Mailbox

Kurt sold the Edgewood lot in January to a dealer from Albuquerque, for about forty thousand dollars less than he owed on it. It cost him more than he had planned to lose and less than he would have lost by waiting.

He and Dena sat with Gwen and a loan officer three Mondays running. They kept the lot in Moriarty and the house, and they are still paying. He stepped down from the fair sale committee that spring. Nobody asked him to. He told Pastor Gil he did not feel he had earned the photograph.

I wrote two telephone numbers in the front of my checkbook, Gwen’s and Eloy’s, and told them both to call if anybody, my own flesh and blood included, asked for a thing I had not first said yes to.

On the first Saturday of the new year I woke before daylight and put on Gus’s canvas coat. I filled two mugs and took my flashlight and went out the back door.

It was ten degrees, and the frozen ruts in the lane rang under my boots. Two-thirds of the way down the hill I saw something I had not expected, and I stopped.

There was a truck parked at the county road with the engine off, and a man standing by the cottonwood with a thermos mug in his hand and his breath going up white in the cold.

I walked the rest of the way. He did not say good morning. He lifted his mug a few inches, the way men do, and I nodded and stood next to him in the dark.

We drank our coffee side by side without a word, the way I used to stand there with Gus.

When I had finished mine I looked at the other mug in my hand. I held it out to him. He took it and poured it, very slowly, onto the roots of the tree.

“That one’s for you, Uncle Gus,” Kurt said.

Then he took my arm, and we walked back up the hill, and I let him.

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