Darnell turned the spiral notebook around on my kitchen table, and he found the page of last March before I could say a word. I am Leonard Haskins, eighty years old, a retired Boeing inspector, and I sat in my own chair with my hands folded while the boy of my sister stared at a single line in my cramped handwriting. Eight thousand dollars. A coffee can. A check with my name written by a hand that was not mine. His face went from white to gray, and his mouth worked like a fish on a dock.
“Uncle Len,” he said, “I can explain.” I told him to go ahead. Last March, he had come to my house while I was at the senior center, and he had let himself in with the key I once gave him for emergencies. In the pantry, in the old Folgers can, I kept eight thousand dollars in cash for the roof. He took it. Then, three days later, he took a blank check from the drawer of my desk, wrote it to himself for nine hundred dollars more, and signed my name so well that the bank never blinked. I knew about the cash within a week. I knew about the check within a month.
I had not said a word. I had written it in the notebook, in the same ink as every other line, and I had kept on handing him two hundred dollars every payday, to see whether he would ever say the word himself. He never did. Six years of lending had cost me thirty one thousand dollars. The coffee can and the check had cost nine thousand more. The loan I had bought from his lender, one million, one hundred thousand dollars, was the only thing that gave me a seat at the table.
A spiral notebook of paydays set on a kitchen table gave one old riveter the morning to bring his nephew back home in Wichita.
I gave my terms with the letter of the loan servicer laid flat between us. “Darnell, I am not going to foreclose, because your mother would come up out of her chair in heaven and swat me. The loan stays at zero interest, with a payment you can afford, and a clause that if you ever place another bet, I call the whole thing due. You will start the Wednesday meeting at the church on Douglas. You will sell the big house in east Wichita and move to something smaller. And you will repay the forty thousand dollars you owe me, a hundred dollars at a time.”
He wept openly. “I thought you were stingy,” he said. “I said it in front of everybody because I was scared of how much I owed you. Every time you gave me two hundred, I felt it like a hand on my throat. I wanted to hate you so I would not have to be grateful.” I reached across and set a hand on his sleeve. “Son,” I said, “I gave you that money so you would know somebody was still keeping count and still loved you. Those two things are not opposites.”
But the old shame is a powerful thing, and it rose in him once more. Darnell snatched the spiral notebook off the table with both hands and bolted for the front door, intending, I suppose, to burn it in the barbecue. He yanked the door open. On the porch stood three old men in ball caps, Walt, Eddie and Big Joe, my friends from thirty seven years on the line at Boeing, who had come for their Saturday coffee and pie and who now stood shoulder to shoulder in the door frame, holding a pecan pie, a thermos and a bag of donuts.
Walt, who is eighty two and has two artificial knees, did not move an inch. “Darnell,” he said, “that is a lot of notebook for one man to be carrying.” Eddie took the notebook out of his fingers and passed it to Big Joe, who passed it to me, hand over hand, like a rivet gun on the assembly line. Darnell stood on the porch with his empty hands hanging. The old men filed past him into the kitchen, and Walt patted his shoulder on the way by, and said, “Come on in. There is pie.”
The money consequences were set down in a short paper that my lawyer drew up on Monday. The mortgage, one million, one hundred thousand dollars, stayed in my name and was written down to the amount that Darnell could actually pay, which his new job at the dealership covered. He sold the east Wichita house for a profit and moved to a three bedroom in Derby. The eight thousand dollars he repaid in full in four months. I will say that the day he handed me the envelope, I did not count it.
In the name of my sister Eunice, who passed in 2018, I started the Eunice Haskins Fund. It pays for gambling counseling and credit counseling for families and for apprenticeships for young people in the aircraft trades, in Sedgwick, Butler and Harvey counties. In the first year we placed forty seven people in counseling and helped twenty two families avoid foreclosure. One was a grocery clerk from Newton who had been borrowing against his own paycheck every week, and who now keeps a spiral notebook of his own.
This past Sunday, after church, Darnell came by with his new wife and their little girl, and the four of us sat at the kitchen table with a roast. He is thirteen months without a bet. As we finished, he laid a folded piece of notebook paper beside my plate. It was a list, in his own hand, of every payday for the past year and what he had put away. “Uncle Len,” he said, “I kept count.” I read it twice. Then I put on my glasses and wrote, at the bottom, in my cramped hand, paid in full.
