Gary pulled the contract out of the envelope with two fingers, as one lifts a dead mouse by the tail. He read the first line, then the second, and then the number, and he set the page down on the tablecloth between the pork tenderloin and the green beans. “Four million, three hundred thousand dollars,” he said. He turned over the puzzle book that had been lying beside his plate the whole time, the one he kept in his truck for lunch breaks, and he held it next to the page. The same name was printed on the spine. “Mom,” he said, in a voice I had not heard since he was a boy. “Mom, you wrote this one. The Ottumwa Crossword. I do this book every day.”
“I know you do, son,” I said. “I have watched you on the porch with a pencil behind your ear. You sit with your tongue between your teeth, and you say, seven letters, a bird, and you never ask me.” He looked at me with his mouth slightly open. “For forty one years I have wanted you to ask,” I said. “Just once. Just one clue.” Gary pressed his hand over his eyes. Across the table, Tammi sat very straight, her foils bright against the window, her hands folded on the brochure for the home in Fairfield as though it were a hymnal. She said nothing.
I laid it out, as I would lay out a puzzle grid. The pension of Duane had been intended for me. Eight hundred and ten dollars, for twenty nine months. Twenty three thousand, four hundred and ninety dollars, to an account ending in 5927. “I can tell you what it bought,” I said, because Gary had turned to Tammi and asked, in a flat voice, and she had told him. A camper, bought in March, a twenty six foot Jayco. Two trips to the Lake of the Ozarks. A television for the camper.
A yellow pencil sat beside a stiff white envelope and gave one crossword writer the Sunday dinner to bring her son back to the table.
Tammi finally lifted her head. She is fifty one, with a smooth round face and a manner of speaking as if she were reading from a card, and I understood then why no one had ever stopped her. “Arvella,” she said, “I will pay you back.” “Will you?” “Gary and I are not rich. We have a mortgage. We have a daughter at Iowa State. When the pension of Duane came, I thought, this is a little bit of fun for us, and she does not need it. She has her crossword money.” She laughed, weakly. “I thought you would never miss it. You always said you needed so little.”
“I did say that,” I said. “I said it for fifty six years. It was a way of being useful to people who could not see how much I needed.” I put my hand flat on the table. “I am going to tell you what a woman needs at seventy eight, Tammi. She needs her own money in her own account. She needs to be asked before she is told. She needs to hear her name said right. Arvella. Not Arvella, comma, mind the newspapers.” Gary made a sound, a kind of cough. He was crying, and trying to do it without being seen, which is a skill his father also had.
The camper was to be sold. That was the first term, and Gary himself said it, standing, his chair scraping, before I had even spoken. “Sold, Mom. Tomorrow. I will call the lot in Albia.” The pension would go back to my own account, the one at Ottumwa Bank and Trust, on the first of the month, with a letter from the union office in Washington as proof. Tammi would repay the twenty three thousand, four hundred and ninety dollars over three years, at the rate of her choosing, by check, and I would receive a statement every month. “And the room,” Gary said. “The four hundred and fifty. We will give it back.”
“No,” I said. They all stared at me. “I am going to keep paying it. Four hundred and fifty dollars, on the first, in an envelope, as before.” Gary opened his mouth. “Because I am a tenant,” I said. “A tenant has rights. A tenant has a lease, and a door that locks, and a say about the candles.” Tammi looked at the cinnamon candle on the counter. “I would like the coconut one,” I added. “Next time.” And Gary laughed. It burst out of him, a huge, helpless, horrified laugh, and he sat down heavily in his chair and laughed until he had to take off his glasses.
I took the yellow pencil from the table and slid it across the cloth to my son. “Here,” I said. “I have a puzzle for you. It is only one clue.” He looked at the pencil. Then he looked at the back of the contract, where I had written, in my small square hand, a single line of boxes. “Five letters,” I read aloud. “What a mother hopes her son will do when he has done wrong.” He picked up the pencil. His hand trembled. He counted the squares with the tip of the point, one, two, three, four, five, and he filled them in, slowly, and showed me the paper.
He had written the answer in capital letters, all the way across, and it fit. After supper, we washed the dishes together, Gary and I, side by side at the sink, while Tammi sat in the living room with her phone in her lap and did not use it. The Des Moines River glittered in the dark outside the window, and the coal train rumbled. When the plates were dry, Gary said, “Mom, would you teach me to write one? A real puzzle. The kind you make.” I handed him a dish towel. “It takes about forty years,” I said. “But we can begin on Saturday.”
The Courier ran a new puzzle in January, the first in the series, and the byline said, in small letters, by Arvella Kuhl and Gary Kuhl. It was not a good puzzle. The clues were too easy, and he had spelled one of the answers wrong, and I let it stand. People wrote to the paper to say it was the best they had ever seen. One woman said it made her cry. I have kept the letter in my Webster, at the letter Q. Gary says someday he will earn a place there, and I tell him that he has. It is next to the contract. It was the only other thing in the dictionary I did not want to lose.
