Sherry got up out of her chair and went to him.
She knelt down beside the recliner and laid her head on his knee. The way we both used to do when we were small, and he’d sit in his chair after supper reading the farm paper, and we’d lean against his legs on the floor and listen to the radio.
Daddy put his big old hand on top of her head and left it there.
“I forgive you, Sissy,” he said.
Nobody had called her Sissy in forty years.
“I forgave you before you ever came through that door. But forgiving’s not the same as letting it slide. You understand me?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said into his knee.
I stood there and cried. I’m not ashamed of it.
I’d come into that room ready to be angry at my sister for the rest of my life. And Daddy had taken that away from me as neatly as he’d taken his rent back from her. I didn’t know whether to thank him or be mad about it.
After a while, Sherry got up and wiped her face with a tissue from Daddy’s nightstand. She turned around to me. She stood there with her arms at her sides.
She didn’t try to hug me. I didn’t try to hug her.
“I’m sorry, Teresa,” she said. “I’m sorry about your roof. I know you were saving for your roof.”
I thought about my sister going to bed every single night for three years knowing what she knew. Lying next to a sick husband who didn’t know. Sitting across from me at Thanksgiving, passing me the green beans.
I didn’t forgive her right then. But I understood her a little. And that was the start of it.
“Go home and tell Roger,” I said. “Not all at once, if he’s not able. But tell him. Don’t carry it by yourself anymore, Sherry. It’s too heavy for one person.”
She nodded and went out.
I watched her go down the long hallway. Slow. With one hand trailing along the rail on the wall. Like she was the one who’d broken a hip.
Roger came to see us the next Saturday.
He drove himself to our house, which he isn’t supposed to do yet. He stood on our front porch in his good jacket with his hat in his hand. He looked old. He’d lost forty pounds since the surgery, and his face was gray.
“Teresa,” he said. “Doug. I just found out. Sherry told me Thursday night. I want you both to know I didn’t know. I’d have sold the truck. I’d have sold the house. I’d never have let her take it from Clayton. Or from you.”
Doug shook his hand and brought him inside and made him sit down at our kitchen table before he fell down.
We gave Roger coffee. He sat there turning the cup around and around in his hands. He couldn’t look at either one of us.
“She did it for me,” he said. “That’s the part I can’t stand. She did it so I wouldn’t worry. And I laid in that bed and let her handle everything, and I never once asked her how.”
“You were sick, Roger,” I said.
“I was sick,” he said. “I’m not sick now.”
He set the cup down.
“I’m going back to the lumberyard part time in January. Dispatch desk. No lifting. And the first five hundred is coming out of my check. Not hers. I want you to know that. That money’s coming from me.”
Doug looked at him a long time. Then he reached over and squeezed Roger’s shoulder. Just once. For Doug, that’s a whole sermon.
The first check from Sherry came on the first of December.
Five hundred dollars, in a plain white envelope. Inside was a note in her round handwriting.
“One of 152. I am so sorry. Love, Sissy.”
One hundred and fifty-two checks. That’s twelve and a half years, a little over. She’d done the arithmetic on every dollar I’d paid and divided it out. Sherry always was good with paperwork.
I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like the state of Kentucky.
But that’s getting ahead of things. The part I really want to tell you about is the first of November.
I went to see Daddy that morning, the way I’d promised, to go over his statement with him.
