“Linda,” I read aloud from the letter, and my voice cracked on the second syllable. “It was Linda. That is all Arnold wrote, taped under the seat of his own chair, in his careful block letters. It was Linda who forged the check.” Gene, my son, sat on the couch with his elbows on his knees. Linda, his wife, stood by the window holding her purse in both hands. Mrs. Alvarez from next door, who had come over with a casserole and stayed, stood very still in the hall as though she were a lamp.
The check was twenty two thousand dollars, drawn on the account Arnold and I kept at the credit union in Cedar Rapids. It cleared in August, three weeks after the funeral. I found it only because a young teller named Preston called to say, with embarrassment, that the signature on it did not quite match the one in the file. The signature was of Arnold. Arnold had been dead for twenty days. Somebody had gone through his checkbook and found a blank, and written a very large number.
I had told Gene about it that Sunday, over pot roast. He had gone gray. He swore he knew nothing. Then he turned to his wife and asked where she had been that Tuesday in August. She said shopping. He said, “Linda, for twenty two thousand dollars?” And she said, with a smile that did not touch her eyes, “Gene, you always did think the worst of me.” The next week, a rocking chair came out of the garage. I sat down in it with a cup of tea, and the seat crackled, and I found the letter. It was folded in thirds and sealed with a strip of masking tape gone brittle with age. I knew the tape. Arnold used it for everything: pipes, boxes, and once, memorably, a cracked windshield.
A rocking chair can keep a secret for a whole season and still rock gently when it is told.
Linda did not scream or weep. She set her purse on the arm of the chair and looked at me with the patience of a woman who has already counted the cost. “Fern,” she said, “I borrowed it. I meant to put it back. Your son has a gambling habit that he does not mention, and last spring I discovered that we were three months from losing the house. I did not know where else to turn.” Gene stared at her as if she had spoken in a foreign language. “Gambling?” he said. “Linda, I have not touched a card in a year.”
I will not describe the quarrel that followed. It lasted an hour and it left holes in the plaster, figuratively speaking. What I will say is that Gene had been lying and Linda had been lying, and each of them had been covering for the other without knowing it. Mrs. Alvarez, at the edge of the hall, finally stepped forward and put the casserole on the counter. “Fern,” she whispered, “shall I make some coffee?” I told her it was the best idea anyone had had all day.
When the coffee was poured and everyone seated, I spoke. I told them what Arnold had been like at the end. He had known, I said, from the bank statements, long before the check. He knew his son was in trouble and his daughter in law was desperate, and he did not confront them. He wrote the letter instead. He taped it under the seat of the chair, because he knew that I was the one who would find it, and because he did not want to shame them in front of anyone.
I had two options, and I chose neither the police nor the quiet. I called a lawyer in Cedar Rapids, a gentle old man named Mr. Pruett, and I asked him to draw up a paper. The check would be treated as a loan. Gene would repay the twenty two thousand over six years, at a very low rate, from a job he would take at the hardware store. He would attend a counselor in Marion, once a week, at his own cost. If he broke the terms, the whole matter would go to a judge.
Linda cried when she signed. Gene cried when he signed. I did not cry, because I had cried enough for one lifetime, and because I was proud of them both. They moved into a smaller house, a duplex near the river, and Linda took a job at the school cafeteria. In the autumn, Gene came by on a Tuesday with a sack of groceries and mended the porch rail without being asked. I stood in the doorway, with a dish towel on my shoulder, and watched my son hold the hammer the way his father did. For a moment he was nine again, and I was twenty nine, and the whole warm summer was ahead of us.
The chair now sits in the front room by the window. I rock in it on gray afternoons, with my knitting in my lap, listening to the radio. Mrs. Alvarez comes by on Wednesdays, and we play gin rummy for pennies. She always wins, and she always apologizes. Gene has paid back eleven thousand dollars so far. Every payment comes in a white envelope, with a little note inside, and the notes are getting longer. The last one said only: Dad would be proud. I put it in the pocket of my cardigan and carried it all week.
Sometimes I run my hand along the underside of the seat, where the letter was taped, and I feel the faint roughness of the glue. It is the last place my husband touched, I think, and the first place he spoke to me from the other room. People say the dead leave no instructions. Arnold left one, in block capitals, under a rocking chair, and it told me exactly what to do: be kind, be firm, and keep rocking.
