They shook hands. Bobby held on to Daddy’s hand a little longer than a handshake needs. The way men do when they’ve known each other most of their lives and don’t have the words for being glad.
Bobby asked about the food at the home. Daddy told him the meat loaf wouldn’t hold a candle to Mama’s, but the pie was decent.
Daddy asked what the beans made. Bobby told him fifty-two bushels an acre on the bottom.
“Real good year,” Bobby said, grinning. “I’ll have the fall check out the first of the month, same as always.”
I felt Daddy go still under my hands on the handles of the chair.
“Bobby,” he said. “Where do you send my rent?”
Bobby glanced at me. Then back at Daddy. He looked puzzled, the way a man looks when somebody asks him what color the sky is.
“To Sherry’s,” he said. “Half in March, half in November. Like she asked me to.”
“Since when?”
“Since you went in, Clayton. She came by the house that first fall. Said you’d want it going to her now, since she was handling your expenses. She had the paper from the lawyer saying she was over your business.”
Daddy didn’t move. His hand was still on the corner post.
“Bobby,” he said. “Have I ever once, in twenty-two years, told you I was short on anything?”
Bobby took his seed cap off and held it in both hands. His face had gone a dull red. I could see him starting to put it together, and I could see he didn’t want to.
“No sir,” he said. “No sir. You never have.”
“Do you know what Teresa here has been doing for three years?”
Bobby looked at me. I shook my head a little. I didn’t want to say it.
But Daddy said it for me.
“She’s been paying my bill at that home out of her own pocket. Twenty-one hundred dollars a month. Out of her retirement. Because her sister told her I didn’t have a dime. And her sister told me the rent was paying it.”
Bobby stared at him. Then he stared at me. He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“Clayton,” he said finally, and his voice cracked right down the middle. “I swear to you on my mother’s grave, I didn’t know. I’d never have. If I’d thought for one minute that money wasn’t getting to you…”
Daddy was quiet a long time.
The wind came across the pasture and moved the grass in long waves. A few of the cows lowed up on the hill. His hand stayed on that post.
Then he turned his chair a little toward Bobby, as much as he could turn it himself, and looked up at him.
“Bobby,” he said. “You did exactly what you were asked to do by a member of my family holding a legal paper with my name on it. That’s what an honest man does. Don’t you carry one ounce of this home with you tonight. You hear me?”
Bobby nodded. He couldn’t say anything.
“Now here’s what you’ll do,” Daddy said.
He said it in the voice I remember from when I was a girl. The voice he used when he was telling the hired men which field to start in.
“The first of November, you write that check to me. Clayton Akers. And you mail it to me at the home in town. Room fourteen. Not to Sherry. Not to Teresa. To me. And every one after that, as long as I’m living.”
“Yes sir,” Bobby said.
“And if anybody comes to your house with a paper saying different, you call me first. I’ve got a telephone right by my bed, and I can still dial it.”
“Yes sir. I will.”
Then Daddy put his hand out again. Bobby took it.
“Thank you for taking care of my ground,” Daddy said. “It looks good. You’ve always kept it like it was your own.”
Bobby walked with us back to the car. He helped me get Daddy from the wheelchair into the front seat, lifting him like he weighed nothing at all. He folded the wheelchair and put it in my trunk.
When he closed the trunk lid, he stood there a minute with his hand flat on top of it.
“Teresa,” he said, low, so Daddy wouldn’t hear. “I’m sorry. My wife, Nancy, does our books. She sends that form to the IRS every January, same as she has for twenty-two years. If I had known…”
“I know, Bobby,” I said. “I know you didn’t. And if Nancy hadn’t sent that form, I’d still be paying.”
He nodded. He walked back across the field toward his tractor and didn’t look back.
Daddy didn’t say one word the whole ride back to town.
Not at the church. Not at the school. Not at the stoplight on Main Street. He sat with his hat in his lap and looked out the window. Every so often, he rubbed his thumb across the fingers of the hand that had held that corner post.
I didn’t try to make him talk. I’ve known my father fifty-six years. When he goes quiet like that, he isn’t sulking.
He’s working. He’s turning a thing over like a field. All the way to the bottom.
When I pulled in at the home, he finally spoke.
“Teresa. Call your sister. Tell her I want her here tomorrow at ten. Tell her I said to come by herself.”
“Do you want me here too?”
“I want you both here,” he said. “I’ve got two daughters. I’ll talk to both of them.”
I called Sherry from the parking lot.
She answered on the second ring, bright and busy, with the television going behind her.
“Hey, Teresa! Did you get the tax stuff dropped off?”
“I did,” I said. “Daddy wants to see you tomorrow at ten. He asked for both of us.”
There was a long silence. I could hear her breathing.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He wants to talk to us.”
“About what?”
I thought about what to say. In the end, I only said one thing.
“I took him out to the farm today, Sherry. We saw Bobby.”
The silence went on so long I thought the call had dropped. I looked at my phone screen to check.
Then she said, “Ten.” In a small voice I hadn’t heard her use since we were girls sharing a bedroom.
And she hung up.
I didn’t sleep much that night. Doug didn’t either. Around two in the morning, I heard him get up and go into the kitchen, and when I came out, he was sitting at the table with my IRA statements spread out in front of him and his reading glasses on.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Figuring,” he said.
He’d added up every withdrawal. Thirty-six of them. Plus the taxes we’d paid on those withdrawals, because the government counts IRA money as income when you take it out. Another $9,400 over three years that I hadn’t even thought about.
“Eighty-five thousand dollars, near enough,” Doug said quietly. “All told.”
I sat down across from him.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said. “Not the money. Sherry braided my hair every single morning before the school bus. Every morning, Doug. For years. She walked me to my classroom on the first day of school every year until I was in the fourth grade and told her to quit embarrassing me.”
Doug reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
“People do things,” he said. “Good people do bad things when they’re scared. Doesn’t make the money come back. Doesn’t make her not your sister either.”
