Gary was on the third page, and he had stopped chewing. My son in law is a lean, graying man who manages a feed store, and he held the packet close to the lamp on the end table as though the print had grown smaller. “Lavonne,” he said. “This is the sale of Red River Propane. Eight million dollars.” He looked up, and I saw the pulse in his temple. “Rhonda, did you read this when you prepared the guardianship papers? Because if she had this, Lavonne is not confused. She is rich.”
Rhonda sat on the sofa with her hands between her knees. My daughter is forty eight, a pretty, tense woman with her hair pulled back so tight that her eyes looked widened, and she looked at the packet and not at Gary. “I did not see page three,” she said. “The lawyer only gave me two.” “I think you did see it,” I said. “I think you saw it in June, when you went through my desk with the power of attorney in your purse. Because three days later you closed three college plans. Mikayla. Brody. And little Cole. Thirty six thousand dollars, to an account ending in 5154.”
On the coffee table, among the folders and the glasses of tea, lay the cards. The grandchildren had made them for my birthday, with crayons, on construction paper, and I had set them there that afternoon on purpose. One had a yellow horse on it. One said GRANDMA I LOVE YOU in letters that marched downhill. One was only a purple scribble, from Cole, who is five. I picked up that one and held it where Rhonda could see. “Do you know what the plans were for?” I said. “Mikayla wants to be a veterinarian. Brody wants to build bridges.” I lowered my voice. “And Cole wants to be a horse.”
A purple crayon scribble lay among the tea glasses on a coffee table and gave one propane company owner the evening to bring her daughter back to the truth.
Rhonda made a sound that I had not heard from her since she was a girl, a high thin wail that she tried to catch with her fist. “Mama, I was drowning,” she said. “Gary lost his hours at the feed store in the winter. We were behind on the house. I did not know how to tell you. I thought, it is just money that is sitting there. I will put it back when the settlement comes through.” Gary closed his eyes. “What settlement?” he said. She did not answer.
“There is no settlement,” I said gently. “Is there, honey?” She shook her head. “There was never anything coming. I just needed to say a sentence that sounded like a plan.” I put the purple scribble down on the table. “Rhonda, I would have given you the money. All of it. You never had to take it. You had only to ask me once, in your own voice, and I would have written the check.” She was weeping openly now, with her mouth wide, like a child who has lost a tooth. “But you took it, and you did it in secret, and that is the thing that I cannot unsee.”
Gary put the packet down on the cushion. He stood up. He is a quiet man, and I had never seen him angry, and he was not angry now. He went to the sofa and knelt down on the carpet in front of my daughter, a man of fifty, with a bad knee, and took both her hands. “Honey,” he said, “we are going to fix this. Tonight. I should have seen how bad it was. I did not want to know.” He turned his head toward me. “Lavonne, what do we need to do?” It was the right question, and I loved him for it.
I told them. The college plans would be reopened, with the lawyer, and the thirty six thousand dollars restored from my own funds, so that the children would never know anything had happened. But the power of attorney would be revoked, in writing, and moved to a trust company. And Rhonda would make good to me every penny of it, over ten years, at a rate she could afford, from her salary at the clinic. “Not as a punishment,” I said. “As a proof. So that someday when Cole asks you whether you were ever in trouble, you can say yes. And that you paid it back.”
She nodded, over and over, as though she were afraid I would take it back. Gary put his arm around her. Neither of them could speak. From the hallway came the sound of small bare feet. Mikayla, who is eleven and misses nothing, stood in the doorway in her pajamas, holding a stuffed rabbit, and looked from face to face. “Grandma,” she said, “is everyone okay?” I held out my arms. “Everyone is going to be,” I said, and she came across the room at a run, and we held each other, all of us, in a pile on the sofa.
Rhonda paid every month. She mailed a check on the first, with a note in the memo line, and for the first year the note said Sorry. In the second year it said Thank you. In the third, it said nothing at all, which I took as a sign of peace. Gary found work with a grain company in Duncan, and the house was saved. On Sundays the whole family came to dinner, and Cole sat at the end of the table on two phone books, and told me, with great seriousness, what a horse says to a veterinarian.
In the spring, I framed the purple scribble. I hung it in the hall, beside the picture of the old propane truck, between the cards of the other two grandchildren. Rhonda found it one evening when she came to drop off a casserole. She stood in front of it for a long time. “Mama,” she said, “I want to be someone that Cole would draw a horse for.” “He drew it for you,” I said. “Look at the legs.” She laughed through her tears and said she could see them. And I could, too, four little purple legs, all running.
