My father-in-law looked at the empty corner of my son’s room, where a $460 guitar should have been after seven months of Saturday shifts, and said, “That boy lies like his daddy did, Dana. Check his pockets.” I almost listened to him. Then the man who paid Bentley every Saturday called me at work.
Bentley was fourteen, and since his father drove off to Nevada with the truck and our joint account, he hadn’t asked me for one thing that cost more than a pizza.
He just looked.
The guitar hung in the window of the pawn shop on Ninth Street, between a leaf blower and a box of DVDs.
Sunburst finish. A chip in the paint by the volume knob.
He knew the year it was made and the gauge of the strings on it.
He knew the tag said $460, because he checked it every time we drove past, which in Kokomo is twice a day.
In March he came into the kitchen with his hair still wet and said Hank Novak needed somebody to unload crates at the farm market on Saturdays.
“Six to noon. Twelve an hour, cash.”
“You don’t have to do that, bud.”
“I know. I want to buy it myself.”
I made him swear his grades wouldn’t slip, and he shook on it like a man buying a car.
Every Saturday he left at a quarter to six in his dad’s old flannel.
Every Saturday he came back smelling like onions and wet cardboard, with splinters in both palms.
I’d ask how close he was.
“Almost.”
March. April. June. August.
September.
The leaf blower was gone from the window by then. The guitar was still hanging there.
I’m a pharmacy tech. I count things all day for a living, so one night at the kitchen table I counted.
Thirty Saturdays at seventy-two dollars came to over two thousand.
He could have bought that guitar by May. He could have bought it FOUR times.
Our neighbor’s porch light had been blinking on and off for a week and nobody fixed it.
I told myself he’d changed his mind. A girl, maybe. A car fund.
Then on a Thursday his light was still on at one in the morning.
The door was open a crack.
He was sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a shoebox in his lap and fives fanned out across the bedspread.
A lot of fives.
More than a few weeks of fives.
He saw me and slapped the lid on so hard the box tipped against his knee.
“What is that?”
“Guitar money.”
“That’s a lot of guitar money, Bentley.”
“Hank pays in fives. It looks like more than it is.”
He pushed the box under the bed with his heel and smiled at me the way his father used to smile at the bank.
I let it go. He was fourteen. I wanted him to have one drawer I didn’t open.
That Sunday we ate at Roy’s.
Roy asked where the famous guitar was, and laughed when Bentley said almost.
When Bentley went down the hall to the bathroom, Roy leaned across the pot roast.
“Seven months and NO guitar? Come on. That boy lies like Jimmy did, Dana. Check his pockets before he starts on yours.”
I didn’t say anything.
I hate that I didn’t say anything.
Two Saturdays later, noon came and went.
One o’clock. Three. Six. His phone rang once and dropped to voicemail every time I tried.
At twenty to nine the side door opened.
His jeans were black with mud to the knee.
The flannel was ripped at the shoulder.
A fresh scrape ran across his cheekbone.
“Where were you?”
“I fell.”
“Fell where, for nine hours?”
“By the tracks. It’s fine.”
“Where’s today’s money?”
He looked at the floor.
“Somewhere safe.”
“Where is somewhere safe, Bentley?”
“Mom. Please. Can I just take a shower?”
I stood in the kitchen listening to the pipes knock, and the whole time it was Roy’s voice in my head. Check his pockets.
The shoebox. The tracks. The fives. Somebody older. Pills. A debt he couldn’t tell me about.
The next Saturday I was working the counter when my cell buzzed with a number I didn’t have saved.
“This Bentley’s mom? Hank Novak, from the market.”
“Is he okay?”
A long pause.
“I don’t know how to answer that, ma’am. Can I ask you something? You know where his pay goes every week?”
“He’s saving it. For a guitar.”
Air went out of him, hard, through the nose.
“You might want to sit down. Whatever he’s told you about that money, none of it’s true.”
I grabbed the edge of the register.
“Then where does it go?”
Then a voice behind him, high and cracking. My son’s.
“HANK, DON’T TELL HER. YOU PROMISED ME.”
Something heavy went over. A crate, maybe. Two men yelling.
“Bentley? BENTLEY.”
Hank came back on, out of air like he’d run.
“Ma’am, he’s trying it again. You need to get here right now.”
“Trying WHAT?”
The line went dead.
I left a woman standing at my register with her insulin half rung up.
Twelve minutes to the market. I went through two red lights.
In the back lot four men in canvas aprons stood around a pallet, and nobody was talking.
Bentley was in the middle of them, his face blotchy, the shoebox open at his feet.
Receipts. Dozens. Money order stubs folded in half.
A white pharmacy bag with my own store’s name on it.
And on top, an envelope addressed in handwriting I’d seen on every birthday card my son had ever gotten.
Big slanting capitals.
The same ones that signed GRANDPA ROY under a five-dollar bill, every single year.
The back lot
I picked up the envelope before anybody could stop me. The flap was tucked in, not sealed.
Inside was one sheet off the notepad Roy keeps by his phone, the one the funeral home gives out with praying hands at the top.
B. Need 200 Saturday. They cut the gas the 20th. Bring what you got put back. Not one word to your mother, she has enough on her and she’d only take it out on you. G.R.
Under it was another envelope in the same capitals. And another.
Hank stood by the pallet with his apron untied and one hand flat on his chest, getting his air back.
“He’s been handing his pay to your father-in-law since the first Saturday,” Hank said. “Roy pulls the Buick around by the dumpsters at noon. Kid walks out, gets in, gets out. Sixty dollars. I’ve watched it thirty times.”
“What’s he trying again, Hank?”
“To run. He showed up this morning with that whole box under his arm. I told him I was calling you. He went for the fence by the tracks, same as two Saturdays back. Tristan caught his belt.”
A kid in a hairnet lifted his hand an inch, like he was in school.
I got down on the asphalt in my work smock. Gravel went through the knees of my pants. I took Bentley’s wrist, because that’s what I had, and it was shaking, and the splinters were still in the heel of his palm where I’d told him a hundred times to wear the gloves.
He wouldn’t look at me. He looked at the box.
“He said if you found out, he’d lose the house,” Bentley said. “Mom. Is Grandpa gonna lose his house?”
Tuesdays and Thursdays
When Jimmy left, it was the February before last. He took the truck, the joint account and the good cooler, and he left a note on the counter that said Sorry D like he’d borrowed a pen.
Roy was at my side door by seven the next morning.
He had a sack of groceries and a new deadbolt still in the package. He put the lock on himself, kneeling on my linoleum at sixty-six with his reading glasses on the end of his nose, and when he was done he said, “I’m not raising another Jimmy, and neither are you.”
I loved him for that. I’m going to be honest about it.
After that it was Roy who got Bentley out of the middle school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the nights I worked till nine. Roy who took him for haircuts. Roy who sat on the bleachers at the one basketball game Bentley ever played, the one he fouled out of in four minutes.
Sunday was pot roast at Roy’s table, every week, at four.
His oven was older than me. The igniter had been dead since the Clinton years, so every Sunday he’d open the door, turn the knob, strike a kitchen match off the box and lean in until the flame went whump and came up blue. Bentley used to time how long Roy held the match before it caught.
On the hutch behind his chair sat an answering machine the size of a hardback book. The red light was always blinking. I asked him once if he ever played those.
“Telemarketers,” Roy said. “I let ’em talk to the tape.”
In April he moved his heart prescriptions off my counter to our other store, the one out on McGalliard.
“I don’t need my daughter-in-law counting my pills,” he said, and laughed, and I laughed too.
He gave me a key to his house that same spring. “In case my heart goes and nobody hears me hit the floor.” It hung on my ring next to the mailbox key.
And Roy ushered at First Methodist every Sunday morning before the pot roast. He’d done it for thirty years. He stood at the left aisle, and the man who stood at the right aisle was Hank Novak.
It was Roy who told Bentley that Hank needed a kid on Saturdays. I’d forgotten that until I was on my knees in Hank’s gravel.
I pulled the envelopes out of the shoebox one at a time and laid them on the pallet, and the men in aprons stepped back to give me room, like it was a body.
Thirty Saturdays. Eleven envelopes.
The gas station on Madison
Bentley talked in my car with the engine off and the seatbelt still on, like he might need it.
The first Sunday in March, Roy walked him out to the curb after dinner. He showed him a gas company notice with PAST DUE stamped on it in red. He said a man his age doesn’t ask his son’s wife for money, not after what his son did to her.
“He said I could keep twelve a week for the guitar,” Bentley said. “So it was fair. Sixty to him, twelve to me.”
“And the fives?”
“I traded my ones at the bank window every month.” He picked at a splinter. “So it’d look like I had more.”
Three hundred and sixty dollars. I didn’t have to count it. I’d already counted everything else.
“What about the money orders, Bentley?”
“Grandpa’d drive us to the gas station on Madison and I’d go in and buy them with the cash. He said the gas company won’t take cash off him anymore. He filled them out at home.”
“Who’d he make them out to?”
He shrugged at the windshield. “The gas company. Bills. I don’t know.”
He knew. I just didn’t know that yet.
Hank leaned down to my window. He’d put his apron back on.
“I’ve known Roy since we were both in short pants,” he said. “I stand across an aisle from him every Sunday. I’m telling you what I saw, and I’ll tell it to anybody you want.”
Then he went back inside, because the tomatoes were still on the truck.
I called Roy right there, on speaker, with Bentley beside me. I wanted him to hear his grandfather say it was a mistake.
Roy picked up on the second ring. He always does when it’s me.
“Hank Novak called me,” I said. “I’m at the market. I’ve got your envelopes.”
There was a sound like a chair being pulled out.
“What’s that boy telling you now?”
“Roy.”
“No, you listen. You told me yourself, two thousand dollars and no guitar. Now there’s two thousand dollars gone and he’s pinning it on an old man with a bad heart. Jimmy did this exact thing at fourteen. Exact thing. Stole out of my wallet and cried about it.”
“It’s your handwriting.”
He laughed. It was the same laugh from Sunday dinner, over the pot roast.
“Anybody can write in capitals, Dana. Ask him who taught him.”
Copay
Bentley slept from four in the afternoon until the next morning. I checked on him six times. I kept thinking about the fence.
I spread the shoebox out on my kitchen table and did what I do all day.
Eleven envelopes, in date order. GAS. LIGHTS. HEART PILLS. TAXES. HEART PILLS again. Roy didn’t put dollar signs on anything. He just wrote the number big and underlined it twice.
Thirty money order stubs, sixty dollars each, all bought at the gas station on Madison on a Saturday between twelve-fifteen and twelve-forty. Eighteen hundred dollars. The customer copy doesn’t show who it’s paid to. I know that because I’ve bought them for my own rent.
Then the gas notice, the one Roy showed my son at the curb. I flattened it with the side of my hand.
It was real. PAST DUE in red, his name, his address on Kirby.
It was dated March of last year. Nineteen months old.
I’d sat at Roy’s table every Sunday for nineteen months and watched him strike a match and lean into that oven, and I’d never once wondered whether the gas was on.
The white pharmacy bag was last. It was folded flat, the way you’d keep something you meant to prove with. Bentley said Roy had handed it to him in June out the car window. “Look what they charge an old man to keep his heart going.”
The receipt was still stapled to the top. Our McGalliard store’s number. CAMPBELL, ROY E. Metoprolol, ninety days. Atorvastatin, ninety days.
I ring up that plan forty times a shift. I know what it pays before the screen does. Generic heart pills on his tier cost exactly what the receipt said they cost.
Copay, $0.00.
The hutch
Monday morning Roy goes to the men’s breakfast at First Methodist. Eggs and sausage gravy in the fellowship hall, seven to nine. He’s never missed one that I know of.
I called in. Kavita took my shift without asking why, which is the kind of friend she is.
At ten after seven I let myself into Roy’s side door with the key he’d given me in case his heart went.
The house smelled like coffee and Aqua Velva. His slippers were by the recliner, toes pointed at the TV.
I went to the stove first. I turned the front burner knob and held it, and I didn’t need a match. It ticked once and caught. The flame came up blue and steady.
I turned it off.
The answering machine sat on the hutch where it always sat, behind his chair at the head of the table. The red light was blinking. A little window on top said 3.
I pressed play.
A woman from the bank, about a debit card. A man about his car’s extended warranty.
Then a beep, and a voice I’d been married to for sixteen years.
“Dad. It’s me.” Traffic behind him, a truck going by. “Money order came Thursday. Thank you. Listen, they’re on me about the lot rent out here, so if you can make it two hundred this time, that’d square me. I know. I know. Tell Bent I said hey.”
A pause, like he was going to hang up and didn’t.
“And don’t put Dana on. I mean it, Dad.”
The machine beeped and the tape whirred back to the start.
I stood in Roy’s dining room with my hand still on the hutch. Two hundred. Bring what you got put back.
Every Saturday at noon my son walked out to the dumpsters with his sixty dollars, and every Thursday it landed in Nevada.
The side door opened behind me. Roy was standing in it with a styrofoam cup of church coffee.
Roy’s checkbook
He didn’t ask what I was doing there. He looked at the machine, and then at me, and he set his coffee down on the counter very carefully, like it was full.
“You had no business,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I took the envelopes out of my purse and laid them on his table, eleven of them, in date order, where the pot roast goes.
“He’s my son,” Roy said. “You don’t know what it’s like out there for him. He’s living in a camper on a lot with no water half the week. You want me to let him starve? Is that what you want? My only boy?”
“With Bentley’s money.”
“The boy wanted to.” He pulled out his chair at the head of the table and didn’t sit in it. “You think I held a gun on him? He wanted to. Ask him. Ask him who licked the stamps. He knew every dime went to his daddy. He knew it from the first Saturday.”
He jabbed a finger at the envelopes.
“I told him, we get your daddy square, your daddy comes home for Christmas. And that boy looked at me like I’d hung the moon. Sixty dollars a week to get his father back. You’d have done it too. And he lied to your face every single Saturday and slept fine. So don’t you come in my house and tell me what that boy is. I told you what he is. I told you at this table.”
That was the part I’d driven over for, and I didn’t know it until he said it.
Check his pockets. He’d said it over the pot roast in September, so that if the money ever came up short, I’d already know who to blame.
He was still talking. About Jimmy at fourteen. About my mother’s side of the family. About how I’d run his son off with my nagging and my double shifts, and how he’d been the only man in my house for a year and a half and this was the thanks.
I let him finish. It took a while.
“Eighteen hundred dollars,” I said. “Thirty money orders. Hank watched you take it thirty times, and Hank stands across the aisle from you every Sunday.”
Roy’s face changed. Not much. Around the mouth.
“Hank Novak wouldn’t.”
“He told me he’d tell it to anybody I wanted. Pastor. The men’s breakfast. The county prosecutor’s office on Monday, if I ask him.”
The kitchen clock ticked. It’s shaped like a rooster and it runs four minutes fast and nobody has ever fixed it.
Roy went to the hutch and opened the second drawer, under the answering machine, and took out his checkbook. The register was right there inside the cover. I read the balance upside down. I read numbers upside down all day.
Roy Campbell had eleven thousand four hundred dollars in that account.
He wrote the check standing up. Pay to the order of BENTLEY CAMPBELL. Eighteen hundred and 00/100. He signed it in the same big slanting capitals and tore it out so hard the stub ripped.
“You’ll be back,” he said. “You can’t work Thursdays without me. You can’t work anything without me.”
I folded the check into my purse. Then I took his key off my ring, the one for in case his heart went, and set it on the table next to the envelopes.
He looked at the key a long time.
“Who’s going to get him on Tuesdays, Dana? You?”
Ninth Street
The second Saturday in October, I drove Bentley to Hank’s at a quarter to six. It was still dark.
He’d made me stop at the pawn shop on Ninth the afternoon before. He paid for it himself. Three hundred and sixty dollars in fives out of the shoebox, plus two Saturdays of his own pay, every dollar of it, counted out on the glass while the man behind the counter tried not to smile.
Roy’s check is in a savings account at the credit union with Bentley’s name on it. He hasn’t asked about it. I haven’t brought it up.
I switched to day shifts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It cost me the evening differential, three dollars and ten cents an hour, and I pick him up from the middle school myself now in the same car line Roy used to sit in.
We don’t go anywhere at four on Sundays. Some weeks that’s harder on him than on me, and some weeks it’s the other way.
The flannel had a patch on the shoulder now. I’d sewn it on crooked.
When I got home I went down the hall to put his laundry away, and I stood in his doorway for a minute.
The corner of his room isn’t empty anymore. The guitar sits on a stand he built out of two crate slats from the market, with the sunburst facing the window and the chip by the volume knob turned to the wall, like he’s a little embarrassed about it.
That night I heard it through the door, the same three notes over and over, wrong, then less wrong.
I knocked and asked him how close he was.
He didn’t look up. “Almost,” he said, and turned the peg a quarter inch.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s ever stood in a doorway at one in the morning deciding which drawer not to open.
For another complicated father-son story involving a grandfather’s prized possession, read “My Son Sold Grandpa’s Bike. Its Frame Hung In Our Rafters For Twenty-Six Years.”. And for more family secrets that surface in unexpected ways, see “Four People Knew My Husband’s Knock, And He Was Already In The Ditch” and “The Conductor Looked At My Grandmother’s Cap And Called Her Bobbie”.
