“Mine,” Darren finished, and he laid the small metal change box on my kitchen table with a clank that rang through the quiet house. “Mrs. Watkins, the IOUs in the box are mine. Every one that says Darren. I was nine years old. Melvin let me have a free Nutty Buddy on credit, and he wrote it down, and he never once asked me to pay.” He swallowed. “I stole from him anyway. I stole from you. I am the one who has been drawing from the account.”
I looked at him for a long time. Darren was my youngest, my late bloomer, a gentle man of forty one who had never found his footing since the mill closed. Beside him sat Lacey, his wife, with her hands over her mouth, and Kiara, their daughter, seventeen, staring at her father as if she had never seen him before. In the change box, in the handwriting of my husband, lay a hundred and sixty two folded slips, each one the name of a child and the price of an ice cream. I picked one up. It said, in pencil, Jimmy B., two Creamsicles, owes Tuesday. Melvin had never collected a single one, and he had never lost a single customer either.
I had known something was wrong since June. Money was leaving the savings account that Melvin and I had kept for forty years, a few hundred at a time, in a pattern that made no sense. The bank manager, a woman named Ms. Garrison, said an authorized signer was drawing the funds. The only authorized signer, apart from myself, was Darren. Eleven thousand dollars so far. And then, of course, there was the matter of the woman in Little Rock, and the little boy with the eyes of Melvin.
An ice cream truck can keep a kindness on the books for forty years and never call in the debt.
Darren bowed his head. “Mama, she is named Rhonda. I met her at a gas station, and she told me she was pregnant, and she told me the boy was the grandson of my father. She was lying. I know that now.” The words came out in a rush. “She said the child needed a father and a grandfather. She said that if I did not pay, she would put the picture of the boy in the paper. I did not know what to do. So I drew from the account. I drew and drew.”
I put my hand on his. It was soft and trembling, the hand of a child, I thought, wrongly sized for a grown man. Lacey was crying openly now. Kiara had gone around the table to put her arms around the shoulders of her father. I said, “Darren, who told you that the boy was a Watkins?” He looked up. “Rhonda said that you and Daddy knew. She said Daddy had been helping her for years.” I closed my eyes. I thought about forty five years of marriage, and the ice cream truck, and the song.
We drove to Little Rock the following Saturday, the four of us, in the van of Darren. The address Rhonda had given him was a small rented house with a chain link fence and a plastic slide in the yard. She came to the door in a bathrobe. When she saw me, she went the color of milk. A little boy of six looked out from behind her legs, with light brown hair and a missing front tooth. He looked at the ice cream money box in my hands, and then at me, and he smiled.
I will not describe all that was said on the porch. It was Rhonda who gave way in the end. She admitted that the boy was not the son of Darren, and was not the grandson of Melvin, and that she had seen the obituary of my husband and a plan had formed. The boy, Eli, was her own, and the father was a man in Texas who paid nothing. She had been desperate. She wept, and the boy tugged her hand, and I, who had come to scold, found that I could not.
I did not call the police on her. I know some will think me a fool. I called a social worker I knew from church, and in a week there was a plan: a job training program, a child care voucher, a counselor for Eli. I told Rhonda that the money was gone, and that she must never again call my son. But I also told her that the ice cream truck still ran in Fort Smith on Saturdays, and that her son could have a free cone any time he came. She nodded, and wiped her face.
Darren paid back every dollar he had drawn, over four years, from a job at the post office that I helped him find. He and Lacey went to a financial counselor. Kiara, who had said not one word during the drive home, wrote me a long letter on lined paper. She said she was going to study social work. She said she wanted to be the kind of person who helps rather than hurts. I kept that letter in the change box, among the IOUs, between the one for Darren and the one for a boy named Walter.
The truck itself is parked in the barn, with the paint faded and the freezer silent. Every July, Darren and Kiara bring it out, wash it, and fire the old engine. We drive it, slowly, through the neighborhoods of Fort Smith, ringing the little bell, giving away cones to every child. We do not charge. I sit in the passenger seat, and Darren drives, and the song comes tinkling out over the hot summer streets. Children run toward us with their hands out, and I write each name in the change box. When the sun goes down and the street lights come on, we park under the old elm and Darren turns off the engine. For a minute nobody speaks. The silence after the song is the best part.
