The Weeks
My uncle came to the yard on Sunday the twentieth, because I had told him to. I had known he would come. I had had one night to prepare, and I did the one thing I could think of to keep from telling him what I owed. I made it into a fight about a handshake.
I had practiced the sentence. It is a thing I would like not to be true, and it is true. I practiced it in the cab of the truck on the drive to the yard, out loud, like a man learning a part. The first draft was harder. I cut it down to the one I used, because I thought if I could make him feel that he had only been a lender, he would stop looking at me the way he was looking at me. He would stop being a man who had been wronged and start being a man who had made a bad loan, and I could stand in front of that.
It did not work, of course. What I saw on his face was not anger. It was a sort of settling, the look of a man who has been carrying something up a hill and finally has to put it down, and I understood, standing there with a bundle in my arms, that I had not made him smaller. I had only made myself a man he did not know.
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He did not call me. I did not call him. Forty-three days.
I would like to say I spent them in remorse. Mostly I spent them making payroll and driving past the end of his lane. I did that twice. The first time, on a Wednesday, I made it to the mailbox and kept going. The second time I stopped at the end of the county road with the engine running, and the porch light came on, and I put the truck in gear.
Tamra said, on the Tuesday after, “You said a cruel thing.” I said I knew. She said, “Then say what it cost, out loud, to me.” And I could not.