The Loan I Never Told Her About

September

I was in Walsburg when Penny called. I do not remember the drive. I remember that I called the bank on the way, from the road, to say I would be out, and that the girl at the front desk said, “Oh, Mr. Ulmer, I’m so sorry about Mr. Waldrip,” and it was a small town, so she knew.

We buried him on a Saturday, the thirteenth, in the cemetery on the north edge of Raine, under a hard blue sky, with the Methodist ladies’ ham and potato salad afterward in the church basement. Half the town came. The Dreamland’s marquee still said the picture he had run the weekend before. Pearline stood by the grave very straight in her navy dress, and when it was done she put her hand on the casket and said something I could not hear. Then she went and shook hands with every person who had come.

On Monday I opened the Dreamland’s note file at my desk. I know what you are going to say, and you are right. I should have called a bank attorney. I should have gone to Pearline with the paper in my hand. But a man’s account is frozen the moment the bank is told he has died, and the account that had paid the note, Cliff’s personal savings, held $212 and had been sealed, and the payment was due that very day, and the note had two names on it. His and mine.

I did not want it reported late. Mostly, I did not want a certified letter to land on Pearline Waldrip’s table in the first week of her widowhood with the word DELINQUENT on it. I could not do that to her.

So I paid it. I took $376 out of my own checking account on the fifteenth of September, and I made out the receipt in his name, and I put it in a folder in my desk. I told myself it would be one month or two, while the estate was sorted, and that I would tell Penny that night, and Pearline by Christmas.

I did not tell Penny that night. I want to say that plainly, because it is the part I am least proud of. My wife is a good and fair person, and I knew what she would say, which was, “You will tell my mother tomorrow.” And I knew what would happen if I did. Pearline would say, “How much?” and she would count it, and she would pay me back out of nothing, in installments, for years, out of the Dreamland’s winter weeks, and the Dreamland would die of my kindness. I thought, if I wait until the building is settled, I can do it clean.

October came. Then Thanksgiving. Then Christmas, and I sat at Pearline’s table and carved her ham and did not say a word. I paid on the fifteenth of January. And February. I told myself every month that this was the month, and every month I paid, and it became a habit, and a habit is a quiet thing, and it is the quietest way I know to turn a lie into a life.

I paid fourteen times. I put the receipts in a folder. The folder is in my truck right now. It is $5,264.