Courtney set down the card from the fruit basket and read the name printed in the corner of the white envelope for a third time. My daughter in law is thirty six, a hospital billing clerk with a long dark braid and a way of listening with her whole face, and she looked from the envelope to the sectional sofa visible through the doorway, to the receipt she must have been picturing in the drawer. “Mavis,” she said slowly, “this is the furniture chain. They are writing to you.” She turned the first page. “Three million, nine hundred thousand dollars. For the jingle.” Her hand went to her mouth.
Wade did not laugh. He sat at the head of the table in his work shirt, a gray, thick, sandy man of forty eight with a truck dealership lanyard still around his neck, and he looked at the folder in front of him as if it had begun to burn. “Mama, I can explain the solar thing,” he said. “The man made an error. I was going to correct it.” “The man is named Travis,” I said, “and he is very nice, and he told me exactly where the money went. Twenty one hundred dollars a month for thirty four months. Seventy one thousand, four hundred dollars. To an account ending in 8240.”
Courtney said, very quietly, “The truck.” She was looking at her husband. “You said the truck was a bonus. You said it was for the sales numbers.” “Courtney.” “You said the vacation to Gatlinburg was points.” Wade bent his head. “And the new countertops. And the boat trailer.” She stood up. She is not tall, but she stood up as if she were, and the chair rolled back on the linoleum. “Wade Ledford. The farm of your father. Your mother. You stood at the funeral and held my hand.”
A fruit basket card lay beside a white envelope on a kitchen table and gave one jingle writer the Sunday afternoon to bring her son back to the farm and the truth.
The face of Wade crumpled. It came down in pieces. He put both hands over it. “I know,” he said through them. “I know. I know. I kept thinking I would stop. I would take one more month and fix the credit cards, and then stop. And then there was the truck payment, and then the next month, and the money kept coming, so quietly. It did not feel like stealing. It felt like the sun.” I almost smiled, in spite of everything. The sun works for you now, Harlan used to say. He had meant it so kindly.
I got up from the table. I went to the old sheet music binder on the counter and took out of it the page I had saved, Harlan Makes It Home, in pencil, with a coffee stain on one corner. I laid it flat in front of my son. “I wrote this in the front room in 1986 with a baby on my hip,” I said. “You were that baby. You were nine months old. You were chewing on a pencil, and the first line came to me because you made a noise like Sit a spell.” His hands came down from his face. “It was always yours too, Wade.”
He was weeping again. I was not. A kind of calm had settled on me, the calm I used to feel in the church kitchen before a funeral supper, when the work was clear and there was nothing to do but carry it. “Here is what happens,” I said. “The quitclaim stays unsigned. The lease with the solar company is reinstated, with the checks coming to me. The seventy one thousand, four hundred dollars is repaid, to the penny. And you will sell the truck.” Courtney drew in her breath. “Mama.” “Wade,” I said, “I am not asking. I am telling you how a person comes home.”
He nodded. He nodded for a long time. Courtney had gone to the sink and was running water over her hands, though there was nothing in them, her back to us, her braid down her spine. When she turned, her eyes were red but her chin was steady. “Mavis,” she said, “I am not leaving. I want you to know that. But I need somebody to tell me what the numbers are. All of them. Before the end of the week.” “I will sit with you,” I said. “And Wade will bring the statements. And I will bring a pie.”
We sat together at that table through the whole of Saturday, the three of us, with a calculator and a legal pad and three pots of coffee. It took eleven hours. When the numbers were finished, they were worse than any of us had thought, and also somehow better, because they were finally true. Wade read them aloud, in a flat voice, one line after another, and at the end of each line he said, “That is mine.” Courtney wrote it down. I watched my son become a man in that kitchen, an item at a time, like a house being swept.
The repayments began in March. He paid in cash, in an envelope, every month, to my hand, in the sunroom of the little house that I bought on Jefferson Street, after the farm check began to come to me again. Courtney came with him on the first Sunday of each month, and we ate pie. In the second year, she began to hum. I noticed it one afternoon: a tune from the other room, softly, as she dried the dishes. Sit a spell, sit a spell. I did not look up from my knitting. I let her hum all the way to the end.
The jingle plays on the television most evenings now, in a bright new orchestration with a choir of children, and the furniture chain sent me a white recliner with a ribbon on it. I like it. Last Thanksgiving, Wade brought his family to my house for dinner, and after the pie he sat down at the little piano in the corner, which he had not touched since high school, and picked out the tune with one finger. Courtney leaned on the piano. Their daughter sang the words. And I closed my eyes in the white recliner, and I sat a spell.
