The Pickup Bought in My Name

“Yes?”

“Mom’s going to want to see you.”

“I want to see her.”

“She’s got a pot roast on,” he said. “She’s been making one every Sunday since you went in, in case you came by.”

I could not answer that. I stood there with my cane and my daughter and my blue vinyl checkbook, and a lump rose in my throat that I could not get around.

“Tell her I’ll come tomorrow,” I said.

We drove home with the manila envelope on my knees and the checkbook on top of it. Darla drove. Neither of us talked for the first ten miles. The fields were stripped to stubble, and a flock of geese crossed the sky in a long ragged line, headed south.

“Mom,” Darla said at the Gilford turnoff.

“Yes, honey.”

“What do I do now?”

“Right now? You go home and you sit down with your feet up, because you’re eight months along and you’ve had a long morning.”

“And after?”

“After,” I said, “you decide what kind of marriage you want. And I’ll back you either way. I mean it. Either way.”

She nodded and drove on. After a mile she said, “Can I stay at your house tonight?”

“The spare room has fresh sheets,” I said. “It’s been waiting.”

That night she slept in the room she grew up in, under the glow-in-the-dark stars she stuck on the ceiling when she was nine. I sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and watched her breathe.

I did not sleep much. I got up at midnight and went into the kitchen and sat at the table with the checkbook. I opened it. Inside, the register was in Brock’s handwriting, neat as a schoolboy’s. Propane, paid. Electric, paid. Farm Bureau, paid, with a little check mark and the date. He had done every one of them exactly, to the penny.

That was the part that hurt. Not the forgery, and not the truck. It was the care he had taken with my bills while he was spending my name, and I put my face in my hands at midnight in my own kitchen.

On Monday morning I went to the credit union branch, closed my old accounts, and opened new ones with new numbers and a new checkbook in a plain brown cover. The teller, a girl I had once delivered a graduation card to, helped me, and she did not ask a single question.

On Sunday, the day after the lot, I drove the Taurus out to County Road E-23, past the Sorenson Creek bridge, to the white farmhouse with the cardinal feeder on the porch.

The porch light was on.

It was ten in the morning, full daylight, and Opal Vandeberg had left her porch light burning, and she was standing behind the screen door in her church dress with both hands on her walker. She is eighty-four. She had gotten dressed, I learned later, at seven.

“Mavis Sorenson,” she said. “You’re late.”

“I know, Opal. I’m sorry.”

“Gil called last night.” She pushed the screen door open with her walker, and her chin trembled once, and she steadied it. “He told me what you did on that lot. He told me how you held your head.”

“I only read the paperwork.”