I laid the old guest check flat on the rail of the table at the Legion and read it a second time, while Lyman stood beside me with the whistle in his hand and the whole room held its breath. It was a green check from a tavern in Storm Lake, soft as cloth from forty five years of folding. In the hand of Frankie, in blue ink, it read: Received one Brunswick table, with cues and lamp, two hundred dollars. Paid, one hundred ninety nine dollars. Balance owing, one dollar.
Under the signature of Frankie was a second one, in a looping hand I did not know. Walter Doyle, the proprietor. And below both, as plain as a lighthouse, a note: The last dollar to be paid in person. Dale was sitting at the bar with his chin in his hand, looking at me with the face of a boy who has lost his mother at the fair. “Ma,” he said, “I did not know. The man is outside. He says he has been trying to find you for a month.”
I handed my cue to Lyman and put my coat on. I walked out into the cold of the parking lot in the March dusk, with the whole Legion crowding the windows behind me. A very old man was standing beside a pickup truck, thin as a rail, in a wool cap, leaning on a cane. He was eighty nine. When he saw me, he took off the cap. “Mrs. Frankie,” he said. “I am Walter Doyle. I sold your husband a billiard table in 1977.”
He told me the rest, slowly, with the dignity of a man who had been rehearsing it for a long time. Frankie had come to the tavern on the night it closed, and had offered him two hundred dollars cash, which was every cent he had. Walter had known him since they were boys, and told him to keep a dollar, to be paid some day in person, so that they would have a reason to see each other again. “It was a joke,” he said. “It was the kind of joke that two men make when neither can say what he means.”
The smallest debts are sometimes the strongest bonds, for they are the ones we are never in a hurry to pay.
Frankie had come back, Walter said. Every year, on the first of May, for the first ten years, he would drive to the house of Walter in Spencer with a tin of cookies and say that he was not ready to settle up. Then they would play a game on a table in the garage, and Frankie would lose on purpose. After the tavern closed, Walter moved away and they lost touch. Walter had searched for him ever since, and found the obituary only last month, in an old newspaper, and the name of the widow.
My eyes were wet. I had not known any of it. In forty five years of marriage, Frankie had never once said the name of Walter. I understood, standing there in the cold, that he had been a man who kept his friendships in the same place as his tenderness, in a locked room, and who had spent a lifetime meaning to open the door. I took the old man by the hand. “Come inside,” I said. “It is freezing, and you owe nothing.”
“I do not owe it,” he said. “You do.” I laughed. We went in together, and the Legion fell silent. Dale was standing beside the table with his hand in his pocket. When he saw us, he stepped forward, took a crumpled dollar bill from his wallet, and set it on the green felt before Walter. “On behalf of my father,” he said, in a voice that was not entirely steady. “And on behalf of his son, who was a fool.” Walter picked up the bill and kissed it.
The room erupted. Lyman blew his whistle three times. I went back to the table, with my knees shaking, and ran the next shot, then the next, then the eight ball into the corner pocket for the championship of the county. I had been told for fifteen years that I did not know which end of the stick to hold. I raised my cue to the ceiling, and the whole Legion applauded. Walter sat at the bar with the dollar in his hand, weeping.
Dale carried the trophy to the truck for me. He had not looked me in the eye all evening. In the parking lot, with the stars very sharp, he finally said it. He said that he had wanted the table because he missed his father, and had not known how to say so. He said that the basement was the one place in the world that still smelled like him. “I thought if I owned it, I would feel closer,” he said. “Instead I tried to take it from you. I am sorry, Ma.”
I put my hand on his cheek. “You can have all the space you want,” I said. “You can come on Tuesday nights, and I will teach you to hold your bridge hand flat.” He laughed out loud. The next Tuesday, he was there at six, with his own cue in a case that Rooster had borrowed from a cousin. Eight women in aprons watched him chalk up. He missed his first four shots. A retired waitress named Gladys told him to quit choking the stick.
Walter comes every week now, sitting in a chair by the hanging lamp with a cup of coffee, telling stories about tavern nights in 1962 that make the ladies shriek. The dollar sits in a small frame above the stairs, next to the old guest check, and under it Lyman has lettered, in white paint, a single line. Balance owing, none. On the rail beneath, the chalk of Frankie, with his thumbprint worn in it, waits for the next player.
