The Camp I Sold Behind His Back

What I Owe

I drove to Sunday supper at my in-laws’, and I could not eat. I told Tamra the whole of it in the driveway afterward, the taxes, the camp, the paper. She had her hand on my knee and she said nothing for a long time. Then she said, “So what do you owe him?”

I said I did not know.

She said, “Count it out loud.”

So I did, in the truck, in the dark, with the engine off, and the clocks had gone back that morning, so it was already dark at six o’clock. I owed him an apology, and I did not know yet how to give one that did not sound like I was asking him to forgive me. I owed him the seven thousand dollars, and I owed him the truth about where it went. I owed him the camp’s promise, which I could not pay in the coin it was made in, because the hillside is a dentist’s now and I cannot buy it back. I owed him forty-three days. And I owed him a sentence, one about a handshake and a lender and a thing never written down, which I could not take back.

I will say plainly what I did wrong, in the order I did it. I sold the camp behind his back, when the camp was mine to sell and his money was in it. I did not give him the chance to say no, and I did not give him the chance to say yes either, and that second one is worse, because he would have said yes. I said the cruelest thing I knew how to say to the man who sat on a porch in 2003 and did not let me see his hands shake. And then I let him sit for forty-three days in a silence I could have ended with one phone call, because I was a coward.

Here is what is not an excuse, but is true. I was afraid of him. I was afraid of the way he would look at me if he found out I had done what I did with the payroll money. I was afraid of the kind of man I had to become in front of him: a man who owed. I was afraid he would pay my debt and I would owe him twice, and that I would never get out from under it. I thought I could be a thief in his eyes and keep a little of my pride. I had it backward. My pride was the one thing I had left to give up.

On Monday morning I put the envelope on the kitchen table, and Tamra counted it with me. Seven thousand dollars, in twenties and hundreds, the amount that was left on the day I closed. I had not spent one dollar of it. I had not been able to. It was not mine, and I had known it from the moment I put it in the glove box.

I put the green book in a clean grocery sack, and I put the envelope on top of it, and I took the orange cap off the dash and held it for a minute, and I put it back. That one was my father’s, and I still cannot say I have the right to part with it, though maybe I will, someday, in a field with a stove.