The Loan I Never Told Her About

I said, “Cliff, it will not pass on the Dreamland’s income alone.”

“I know it.” He turned his hat once on his knee. “That is why I am asking you.”

I knew what he was asking. He wanted a co-signer, and he was asking his daughter’s husband, who had been in the family for seven years and eaten a good many of Pearline’s pot roasts. He said it plainly. He did not say please. He said, “I would not ask, but there is nobody else I would trust with it, and I would sooner lose the machine than lose the house.” He meant the Dreamland. To Cliff Waldrip it was the house.

I signed. I want to be honest about why. It was not generosity, and I am not going to tell you it was. I signed because I liked him, and because I could read a payment history, and I had watched that man pay a bill on the day it came for seven years. I thought I was putting my name on a risk of about nothing.

Then he said the other thing.

“Don’t tell Pearline,” he said.

I said, “She doesn’t know you’re borrowing sixty-two thousand dollars?”

“She knows I’m borrowing the money. She knows the machine is handled.” He looked down at his hat. “She does not know it had to have you on it. She would not stand for it. She is a proud woman, Kent, and she has kept those books for twenty-five years so no one in this family would ever have to sign for her. I would rather she believed I had carried it myself.”

I should have said no to that. Every training manual I have ever read tells you a co-signer’s name belongs on a notice to both spouses, and I told myself that the notices could go to Cliff’s account, to a post office box he rented at the Walsburg office, and Pearline would never see a stamp. I said I would keep it quiet. I said it the way you say it to a man who has just asked you to hold something heavy for a minute.

I had no idea the minute would be thirteen years.