The Loan I Never Told Her About

The Arithmetic

By the summer I knew it was not going to settle itself. The Dreamland had gone dark, and Pearline was living on Cliff’s small pension and the Social Security, and the account at her bank held a little under nine hundred dollars after the funeral. The roof over the left side of the lobby had started to drip in the spring. In August the county tax bill came. $3,860, due the first of December, and the notice was in her mailbox for two weeks before she opened it.

I know, because Penny told me, and because the clerk at the county treasurer’s office is a woman I went to high school with.

I am a loan officer. I do arithmetic. It is what I am, and I am not going to apologize for it, because it saved a good many families I will never meet. I sat in my kitchen late one night in August with a legal pad, and I wrote down the numbers the way I would for a stranger.

The roof would cost $18,500. I had a bid from a man in Walsburg. The tax was $3,860. The note had $9,400 left on it, twenty-five payments of $376, and I knew exactly what it would cost me and exactly what it would cost her if the machine ever stopped, because the machine was the collateral and the bank could take it. She had no income from the building. She had no one to run the booth. She was seventy years old and had never in her life climbed the ladder to the room where the picture began.

Then I found the other column. A man named Marlon Nye, in Walsburg, who builds storage units along the highway, had been asking around about the Dreamland since June. He wanted the lot. He would pay forty-one thousand dollars, building and equipment, and close before Christmas.

I wrote it out. $41,000 less the $9,400 payoff of the note, less the $3,860 tax, left $27,740 for Pearline Waldrip, clear, in an account, in a town with no work. And the note would be gone, and my name would be off it, and so would the secret. I would never have to say it. The deed would swallow it.

And under all of it was my father.

My father had the feed and seed in Walsburg for thirty-one years, and he loved it the way Cliff loved the booth. In the nineties it started to lose money, and he would not close it. He mortgaged the house to buy more stock. He kept the lights on four years past the point where a sensible man would have stopped, and when he finally did stop, he had no store, no house, and no say in what came next. I was nineteen. I held the ladder for the man who took down the sign. I have not been able to see a building like the Dreamland, with its patient old marquee and its red carpet and its woman who would not let go, without seeing that sign come down.

I told myself I was protecting Pearline. I was protecting my father’s son.