The Week At The Gulf

My son Rick sat at my kitchen table on a Tuesday in March and told me he needed his inheritance now.

Not someday. Now.

He had his truck keys in his hand the whole time, turning them over, like he had somewhere better to be.

“The company sale closes in sixty days,” he said. “Seven million, Mom. But it’s all tied up. Escrow, the lawyers, the holdback. I’m cash poor right now. You understand.”

I did not understand. I was seventy-four years old and I had never once in my life been seven million dollars of anything, let alone poor.

“You and Dad have got, what, three hundred and ten in the CD,” he said. “It’s just sitting there. I’d pay it back the second the sale funds. It’s my inheritance anyway. I’d just be getting it a few years early.”

Earl was at the counter with his back to us, buttering his toast. He did not turn around. He is a quiet man, my husband, and he has learned over fifty-one years that the loudest thing a person can do is wait.

“A few years early,” I said.

“You’re seventy-four,” Rick said. “Dad’s seventy-six. Let’s be real about the timeline.”

I looked at my son’s face and I thought, there it is. He said it the way you’d read a weather report.

What the three hundred and ten thousand was

I want to be honest about that money, because Rick made it sound like it fell out of the sky onto a shelf and started gathering dust.

Earl drove a grain truck for thirty-eight years. He was gone before light most mornings and home after the kids were down most nights. I kept the books for a seed dealer in town and cleaned the Methodist church on Saturdays for an extra forty dollars a week.

We put three kids through things. Braces. A totaled Buick. A semester of community college for our daughter Kim before she married and quit. We buried my mother and Earl’s father out of that same account, two funerals eleven months apart, and we did not let anybody chip in.

I remember the week Earl first opened that CD. It was a Thursday. He came home with the little green passbook and laid it on the table like it was a baby bird, and he said, “That’s for the bad day, Pauline. Every family gets a bad day. This is so when ours comes, we face it standing up.”

We had faced two bad days out of it already. A furnace that quit in January 2009. A stretch of three months when the seed dealer cut my hours and we lived careful. Every time, we put back what we took, because that was the whole point of a thing you faced standing up.

The three hundred and ten thousand was what was left after all of it. Thirty-eight years of a man leaving in the dark, folded up into a certificate of deposit at the Farmers and Merchants bank, earning its little bit of interest, waiting.

Waiting for what, I could not have told you that March. A new roof, maybe. A long illness, the kind that empties people out. Or nothing. Maybe it was just there so that when we were gone, the kids would each have a cushion, and they would know their father had been careful his whole quiet life.

Rick wanted the whole cushion. For sixty days. So that a man about to be worth seven million dollars would not have to feel, for two short months, like he had less than he wanted.