Tracy opened the envelope at her own kitchen counter, with the dishwasher running and a pot of chili ticking on the stove, and I stood by the refrigerator where a little magnet in the shape of a Route 66 shield held up the report card of a grandchild. My daughter in law is forty two, a school bus driver with a blunt, handsome face, and she read the first paper and then the second, and said nothing at all. Then she looked up at her husband, who was leaning against the doorframe with a beer. “Clint,” she said, “what is a billboard lease?”
Clint did not move from the doorframe. My son is forty seven, a heavy, sunburned man with the thick neck of his father and a high school football ring he still wears on his right hand, and he turned the beer in a circle on the palm of the other. “Tracy, that is business between me and my mother,” he said. “Is it?” I said, from the refrigerator. “Fourteen hundred dollars a month, for thirty months, from the company that owns the sign on the highway. Forty two thousand dollars. To an account ending in 2287. I sat in that diner on Beale Street in March, in the booth behind the plant, and I heard you tell the man at the next table.”
“I heard you tell him the old woman did not read her mail. That she signed a quitclaim on forty acres of desert without asking why.” I set my hand flat on the refrigerator beside the magnet. “I read my mail, Clint. I read every word. I read it that night, after the diner, in the kitchen, with a glass of water. And then I went and found the deed.”
A Route 66 refrigerator magnet held up a school paper in a kitchen and gave one postcard artist the evening to bring her son back to the truth.
The pot on the stove began to bubble. Tracy crossed the kitchen, switched off the burner, and stood with her back to us for a long moment, her hands flat on the counter. “Clint, I stood in the grocery store and put back the good coffee,” she said. “Last winter. Because of the money. And you were taking forty two thousand dollars from a woman who gave you the down payment for this house.” She turned. “Did you think I would never find out? Or did you think I would not care?”
Clint set the beer on the counter. His shoulders sagged, and he looked, for a moment, like the boy of nine who had put a baseball through the window of the Kingman post office and come home white faced to confess. “Mom, I was going to fix it,” he said. “The lot had been sitting empty. Nobody was using it. The sign money was sitting in a pile with no name on it. I thought, who is getting hurt?” “Tracy was,” I said. “I was. And you were. Most of all you.”
I explained. My drawings of the old road had been my own for fifty years, three hundred and forty of them: the diners and gas stations and neon motels and the little stone curio shops on the long road between Needles and Seligman, every one drawn at a kitchen table. When the licensing company offered four million, one hundred thousand dollars, I thought of Clint. I thought, he will finally have enough. And then I heard him in the diner, and I understood that enough was not what he wanted. He wanted it to be taken, because it was easier than being given.
Tracy took the quitclaim paper from the envelope, read it again, and held it out to me. “Henrietta, I do not know what to say,” she whispered. “I want you to hear that I did not know.” “I know you did not,” I said. “That is why I opened this at your counter and not in the office of a lawyer.” Clint covered his face with both hands. “Mom,” he said, behind them, “what do I do?” “You do what a man does,” I said. “You tell the truth to the one who deserves it. You start with Tracy. And you do not stop.”
He told her. It took more than an hour, at the kitchen table, over cooling chili, and I left them alone for it and sat in the car with the windows down, listening to the dry desert wind rattle the sign at the end of the road. When I came back, Tracy was sitting beside him with her chair pulled up close, and he had his head on her shoulder. Her eyes, over his hair, met mine, and she gave a very small nod. It was the nod of a woman who has decided something.
The deed to the forty acres went back to me by Friday, and I put it in the name of a trust, and then signed over half to Clint and Tracy on the day he made the last of his payments, thirty months later, to the dollar. That was how long it took to repay forty two thousand dollars on the pay of a shift supervisor. They never missed a month. On the first of every month he handed the envelope to me in person, at the diner on Beale Street, and we ate a piece of pie, and did not say much.
Tracy keeps the Route 66 magnet on the refrigerator still. But last Christmas she took it down for a day and put up another, a new one, a postcard from the licensing company, with one of my drawings on it, the old Hackberry general store with a red pump. On the back, in her careful hand, she had written, Drawn by Henrietta Doolittle, 1974. My mother in law. I put it in my purse. It is on my own refrigerator now, in Kingman, under the sun, and when I see it I am reminded that being given a thing is a different kind of good.
