Doug came down the stairs slowly, with his wallet in one hand and the look of a man who has been called to the principal office. Karen came behind him, in her robe, her hair in a clip, rubbing sleep from her eyes. I was sitting at the kitchen table, in the pale gray light before dawn, with the shoebox in front of me and the telephone beside it. I pointed at a chair. “Sit down, Doug,” I said. “Karen, you too.” They sat. Doug placed the wallet on the table between us. I did not touch it. “Open it,” I said. “Take out that bond you put in there at Thanksgiving. And lay it on the table.”
He hesitated. Then, with fingers that were not quite steady, he took the folded paper from his billfold and laid it flat. A twenty five dollar savings bond, 1973, with the picture of a president I had forgotten. I looked at it a long time. “Doug, I want you to tell my daughter where the other two hundred and eighteen went.” Karen turned slowly in her chair. “What other two hundred and eighteen?” Doug said nothing. His throat bobbed. I said, “Karen, the Treasury called me yesterday. Someone has been redeeming my bonds at a bank in West Fargo for eighteen months. Someone with my Social Security number.”
Karen was very still. “Doug,” she said. “Tell me that is not what I think it is.” The shoulders of Doug slumped, all at once, like a tent whose pole has been pulled. “Karen, I was going to put them back. I borrowed from the dealership account. The numbers were off. I could not tell you. Your father had all those bonds sitting in a shoebox, and he said they were worth nothing. I thought, what harm?” His voice cracked. “I took a few at first. Then more. I kept thinking I would sell a big car and fix it. But I never did, and they just kept adding up.”
A phone call to the Treasury and a shoebox on a kitchen table turned a son in law caught in a lie into a man worth waiting for.
My daughter looked at him for what seemed like a full minute. Then she stood up, walked to the window, and gazed out at the dark yard, where the frost was beginning to glitter on the grass. She had the shoulders of her mother, and the way her mother held herself when she was holding in something enormous. “I knew,” she said at last, very low. “I did not know about the bonds. But I knew about the dealership. I knew you were behind, Doug. I saw the notices. I told myself you would tell me when you were ready.” She turned around. Tears were streaming down her face. “Daddy, I am so sorry. I should have said something.”
I got up slowly, with my cane. At eighty years old, a man does not rise without a conversation with his knees. I crossed the kitchen and put my arms around my daughter. “Karen,” I said, “you are not the one who took the money.” She laid her cheek against my chest, as she did when she was six. After a moment, I pulled back and looked at my son in law. “Doug, I have been wrong about you in one way. I thought you laughed at me because you thought I was a fool. I think now you laughed because you were afraid.” His eyes were red. “I was. I am. I have been terrified for two years.”
I told him what I had learned. The Treasury had explained it all, patiently, on the phone, in the voice of a young woman who clearly enjoyed the good luck of an old man. Most of the bonds I owned were savings bonds from the late seventies and early eighties. Those paid a very high interest rate, and they had kept earning for thirty years. The four hundred and twelve that remained in the shoebox were worth, with interest, a hundred eighty four thousand dollars. The two hundred and eighteen that Doug had cashed had paid him about sixty one thousand. He had gotten far less than they were worth.
Doug put his head down on the table. A sound came out of him like a kettle. I let him cry. When he finally lifted his head, I said, “Here is what will happen. You will go to the bank in West Fargo today, with Karen, and you will tell them the truth. You will sign an agreement to repay the sixty one thousand. You will sell that fancy truck. And you will tell the dealership owner about the missing money, and let him decide whether to keep you.” Doug nodded slowly. “And one more thing,” I added. “You will take off that ridiculous watch.” He looked down at it, a gold plated thing the size of a saucer, and began, absurdly, to laugh.
The dealership owner kept him. It was a small miracle. A tough old man named Gundersen, he listened for an hour, grunted, and said, “Everybody gets one.” Doug repaid the money in two years. He did it by working six days a week and skipping every commission he earned. He sold the truck and bought a ten year old Buick. Karen went back to work at the library, and the two of them rebuilt their budget on the back of an envelope, line by line, at my kitchen table.
With the money that remained, I did something I had been thinking about since Agnes died. I cashed the remaining bonds, a few at a time, as they matured. I put forty thousand dollars into a trust for each of my grandchildren. I paid off the mortgage of my church. And I bought a small bench, a good oak one, and placed it by the grain elevator where I had worked for forty one years, with a brass plate on the back that reads, For Agnes, who asked why. Because someday. I sat on it that afternoon and let the wind come over the wheat.
In October, Doug took me to the elevator for lunch. We ate sandwiches on the bench, side by side, watching the trucks come in. At last he cleared his throat. “Pops, I never told you why I laughed at the bonds. When I was a boy, my dad lost everything in a farm auction, and he spent the rest of his life telling me that money was the only thing that mattered. I thought you were wrong because he was.” I looked at him. “Doug, I will tell you what I told Agnes. Someday comes. You just have to be patient enough to see it.”
