- Dad started the next week. Three days a week, eight hours a day, pulling orders for contractors and loading pickups with lumber and drywall.
- He came home with sawdust in his collar and his face red from the cold. And he looked ten years younger.
- The second week, Mom made him a lunch.
- She didn’t say anything about it. She just set a brown paper bag on the counter next to his truck keys. A ham sandwich. An apple. And a thick slice of the persimmon pudding she makes every October from the tree in June’s backyard.
- He looked at the bag. He looked at her back, standing at the sink.
- Then he picked it up and took it to work.
- I want to say something about Tammy Reese, because I don’t want anybody to think she was the villain in this story.
- She wasn’t. She was a woman who believed a man she cared about. And he hadn’t told her the truth.
- About a week after the truck, Dad drove out to her sister’s place in Bedford. He didn’t tell us he was going. He told me about it later, at the lumberyard, while he was loading drywall into the back of my truck.
- “I told her all of it,” he said. “The apartment. The couch. The VFW parking lot. June’s house. Your mother’s money. The gas bill. Every bit of it.”
- “What did she say?”
- He set a sheet of drywall down very carefully, like it was glass.
- “She said she wished I’d told her in March, because she’d have liked me anyway.”
- He wiped his hands on his jeans.
- “And then she said she’d still like to go to the fish fry on Fridays. If I was buying.”
- Tammy and her boys rented a three-bedroom house on the north side of town the first of November. Dale at the lumberyard knew the landlord, and Dad put in a word, and that’s what it took. $1,150 a month, split three ways. Kyle got hired on at the same lumberyard in December.
- Dad and Tammy go to the VFW fish fry every Friday night. She lives in her own place. He comes home by ten.
- Mom leaves the porch light on for him and pretends she doesn’t.
- By Thanksgiving, my mother and father had settled into a kind of life together I wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me about it in October.
- They aren’t married again. They’re not going to be. Mom says she’d sooner marry a snapping turtle. Dad says the turtle would get the better end of that deal.
- But they’re something.
- Mom cooks. Dad does the dishes. Mom watches her island show on Wednesdays. Dad watches the Indiana game in the back bedroom with the door shut and yells at the referees through the wall.
- They sit on the porch swing most mornings before he goes to work. She has her coffee. He has his, black, out of the thermos. They don’t talk much.
- They don’t have to.
- On the morning after Thanksgiving, I came by early to look at the furnace before it got cold for real. Mom was still in her housecoat.
- The light was coming in through the east windows of the front bedroom, through June’s lace curtains, landing on the floor in little flowers.
- And on the windowsill, all in a row, June’s violets were blooming. Every single one of them. The purple ones. The pink ones. The white one with the blue edge.
- Mom said they’d never bloomed like that in the north window. Not once in six years.
- “They know where they are,” she said.
- Dad came in from the kitchen with his work boots on and his lunch bag in one hand. He stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the violets for a minute, the same way he had that first day.
- “June would have liked that,” he said.
- “She would have,” Mom said.
- Then he reached into the pocket of his barn coat and took out an envelope and handed it to me.
- It was a bank envelope from the credit union. My name was written on the front in his blocky handwriting.
- He didn’t say anything. He just nodded once, and went out the front door, and I heard the Silverado start up and pull away.
- I sat down at June’s yellow kitchen table and opened it.
- Inside were three crisp hundred-dollar bills. And a piece of Miller Lumber notepaper, folded in half.
- It said: First $300 toward the gas bills. More on the 15th. Dad.
- I sat there a long time with that note in my hand.
- Then I went into the kitchen drawer by the phone, where I’d moved my little yellow sticky notes. Six years of them. Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars.
- I took the top one off the pile. Eighty dollars, from a January three years back. And I threw it in the trash.
- I figured I’d throw out one more every time he paid. However long it took.
- It took him a little over two years. He never missed the 15th. Not once.
- The last sticky note went in the trash on a Saturday morning in March. I was sitting on the porch swing with Mom when he handed me the envelope. When I told him that was the last one, he didn’t say anything at all.
- He just sat down on June’s end of the swing, and Mom poured him a cup of coffee from the thermos, and the three of us sat there and watched the lilac by the back step start to bud.
- THE END..!
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