My daughter told me Father’s Day was “a Bellamy thing this year, Dad, don’t make it weird,” so I ate the Sunday fish fry by myself. I was signing for my $34 walleye when her husband walked in with eleven of his people and read my account number to the hostess for an $11,850 party. He’d never asked whose name was on the lease.
Three weeks before that, I’d called Kiera to ask if Weston could come fishing with me Sunday morning.
Then we’d all eat. That was the whole plan.
She took a long time to answer.
“Hank turns seventy-one that same week, Dad. Trevor’s whole family is coming up. It’s their thing.”
“I’m family too, last I checked.”
“Dad. Please don’t make it weird.”
So I didn’t.
I put on the green plaid shirt Ilene bought me the Christmas before she passed, drove out to the supper club in Minocqua, and asked for the small table by the window.
The waitress had a purple cast on her left wrist and wrote my order with her right hand anyway.
Walleye, coleslaw, a brandy old fashioned. Same as every Sunday for nineteen years.
Ilene had handled all the paperwork on that building. I fixed the walk-in cooler when it quit and I kept my mouth shut, which is what she always said I was best at.
I paid cash. I’ve never once run a tab out there.
I was folding the receipt into my shirt pocket when the front door opened.
Trevor came in first, laughing at something over his shoulder. Then Kiera. Then Hank in a new golf shirt and his wife Julia in white slacks, and a parade of cousins I’d met maybe twice.
Weston saw me before any of them did.
He came straight across the dining room in his church shoes and stood by my chair.
“Grandpa,” he said. “Dad has your green card.”
“Which green card, bud?”
“The one in your truck visor. He took it when he borrowed the truck Tuesday. He said you’d never notice.”
He’s twelve. He doesn’t lie, because he’s never seen the point of it.
I looked over at the host stand.
Trevor had the green card out on the podium. I could see it from twenty feet.
Kiera spotted me then, and her whole face went flat.
“Dad? What are you doing here?”
“Eating fish, sweetheart.”
Hank looked at my one plate and my one glass.
“By yourself? On Father’s Day?” he said.
Julia put her hand on his arm and laughed.
“Somebody should’ve told you, Larry. The senior special’s on Tuesdays.”
A couple of the cousins laughed with her.
Kiera didn’t laugh. She didn’t say anything either.
I stood up, nodded at all of them, and started for the door.
Then I heard my son-in-law at the stand.
“Account two-one-one. Kilgore. Put the back room on it, and the bar. The deposit too.”
I stopped walking.
The hostess was a young woman named Amira Soliman. I’d watched her grow up two docks down from ours.
“Sir,” she said, “that’s a founders’ account. I need the signer here in person to authorize anything.”
Trevor reached into his sport coat and pulled out a folded slip of paper.
“Got his signature right here. He’s family. He doesn’t really do the paperwork stuff anymore.”
“He’s fine with it,” Kiera said. She said it to the floor.
Hank leaned on the podium like it was his.
“Eleven thousand eight-fifty for the room and the open bar, honey. His card covers it. Let’s not hold everybody up.”
Eleven thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars.
On the ONE Sunday I’d been told to stay home.
I walked back to the stand.
Amira had the slip unfolded flat under her hand. I read the bottom line upside down.
Lawrence J. Kilgore.
I don’t have a middle name.
Never have. Ilene used to call me the man with nothing in the middle.
“That’s not mine,” I said. “That signature is NOT MINE, Trevor.”
He gave me the smile he gives waiters.
“Larry. Come on. Not in front of my dad.”
“You took MY card out of MY truck.”
“I BORROWED your truck. You said yes.”
“I said yes to the truck.”
Kiera’s face had gone red up to her hairline.
“Dad, you are embarrassing me in front of everybody.”
“You told me not to make it weird,” I said. “I’m not making it weird. I’m making it RIGHT.”
Hank snorted.
“What’re you going to do, Larry? Call the manager?”
I looked at Amira. She was already looking at me.
“Amira,” I said, “before you run one cent of that, would you go in the back office and bring me the blue binder? Ilene’s desk. Second drawer.”
She didn’t ask a single question. She just went.
Nobody at the stand said a word.
Weston had come up behind me and put his hand in my back pocket, the way he did when he was four.
Julia leaned toward Hank.
“What is that, his warranty for the cooler?”
Two cousins laughed. Hank didn’t.
Amira came back with the binder against her chest. It was the cheap kind from the drugstore, with Ilene’s handwriting on a strip of masking tape down the spine.
I opened it on the podium.
I didn’t need to look for the page. I’d watched Ilene put it in there in 2004.
Page two.
I turned the binder around, slid it across to my son-in-law, and put my finger on the line near the bottom.
“Go on,” I said. “Read that one out loud. The same way you read my account number.”
Page two
Trevor looked at the page for a while before he read it.
Then he read it, because eleven people were waiting on him and he’d been the one doing all the talking.
“House account two-one-one,” he said. “Extended to the lessors only. Drawn against monthly rent.”
He stopped there. Then he started again, lower.
“No charge without a lessor’s signature, in person, matching the specimen below.”
Under that line were two signatures in blue ballpoint. Ilene M. Kilgore. Lawrence Kilgore.
Nothing in the middle.
“Lessors,” Hank said. “What’s a lessor.”
“The landlord, Mr. Bellamy,” Amira said. “Mr. Kilgore owns the building. The club rents it from him.”
Nobody laughed this time.
I reached past Trevor’s elbow, picked the green card up off the podium and put it in my shirt pocket, behind the receipt for my walleye.
Julia looked at Kiera. “Did you know about this?”
“Since I was fourteen,” Kiera said. She said that to the floor too.
Trevor tapped the folded slip with one finger, the way he’d show a waiter which bottle he meant.
“Okay. So it’s his account. Fine. And that’s his signature.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
“Larry.”
“It isn’t.”
Amira still had her hand flat on the slip. She looked at me, then at the wooden rack behind the stand where they keep the house tickets.
“Mr. Kilgore,” she said. “Do you want me to pull the other slips too?”
2004
The bank was going to take the building that spring.
Elliot ran the club then, and his dad before him, back to 1951. That winter there were maybe nine cars in the lot on a Saturday. The roof over the back room leaked into a lobster pot nobody had cooked a lobster in since the seventies.
Ilene had her mother’s farm money sitting in a CD at the credit union in Woodruff, earning nothing. She drove out on a Tuesday, sat with Elliot at the bar for three hours, and came home with a lease.
I didn’t read it. I’ll be honest about that. She said, “Larry, sign where the little flags are,” and I signed where the little flags were.
She stopped my hand before the last one.
“Just Lawrence,” she said. “No initial. You don’t have one, so don’t go making one up for the bank.”
That was the first time she called me the man with nothing in the middle. She thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever said, and she kept saying it for twenty years.
The lease went in the blue binder. Page one was the deed. Page two was the lease.
Elliot gave us the green card the day we closed. He called us the founders, as a joke, because his dad was the real one. Two-one-one was the number on our mailbox.
Ilene put the card in my truck visor herself.
“That card is our rent,” she said. “It’s for when the truck dies out here in January and you need a hot meal and a phone. It is not for walleye.”
So I paid cash. Nineteen years of Sundays.
She had one other rule, and I still keep that one too. Every time I fill the truck, I write the miles on the back of the gas receipt and stick it in the driver’s door pocket. Every December she’d clean out the door and use them for the taxes on the building.
Nobody cleans out the door now. It’s two years of receipts in there, stiff as a deck of cards.
When she passed, Kiera drove up every weekend for a month. Then she said, “Dad, let me take the boring stuff,” and I let her.
The rent check comes to the house on the first. Since that summer Kiera’s had the key to my mailbox. She deposits the check, pays the tax and the insurance on the building, and texts me a thumbs-up. I haven’t signed a check in two years.
And Trevor helped. That’s what people out here would tell you. He cleaned my gutters. He borrowed my truck to haul a dock section to his folks’ place and brought it back washed. He’s the only person alive who calls me Larry, and he started doing it at the funeral lunch.
Standing at the host stand now, he still had his finger on that slip.
“Go ahead,” he said to Amira. “Pull whatever you want.”
Nine slips
Amira went in back again. She came out with a long envelope with a rubber band around it.
House tickets. The carbon kind, one for every time somebody charged two-one-one.
She laid them on the podium in a row, like she was dealing solitaire.
There were nine.
January tenth, the bar, $212. The last Friday in January, a fish fry for fourteen, $640. February, gift certificates, $1,100. A case of wine to go. Two more Friday bars. A Saturday dinner in March I’d never heard of. On down the row to the last one, from two weeks ago, $388.
Every one of them was signed Lawrence J. Kilgore.
“Damian took those,” Amira said. “Fridays are his. He said Mr. Bellamy told him you’d called ahead.”
“I don’t call ahead,” I said. “I sit by the window.”
“It comes to four thousand two hundred and sixty,” she said. “Before tonight.”
Hank picked up the January one and held it out at arm’s length, the way you read a menu when you left your glasses in the car.
“So the man’s been treating,” he said. “Drinks for the family. Gift certificates. I don’t see the crime here, Larry.”
Julia had her arm through his.
“That’s how it started with my mother,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Signing things. Then not remembering she signed them.”
One of the cousins said, “Oh, Jules.”
A busboy came out of the kitchen with a tray of water glasses, saw the crowd at the stand, and went back in.
I put my finger on the nearest slip.
“I didn’t sign a single one of these,” I said. “I have never had one drink on that account.”
It was a plain fact and I said it plain. I thought that would be enough.
Trevor didn’t answer me. He turned to my daughter.
He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke low, the way people talk in a hospital hallway.
“This is what I’ve been telling you, Kee. He doesn’t remember.”
The rent check
Kiera looked at me then. The first time all night she’d looked straight at me.
“The rent’s been short, Dad,” she said. “Every month since January. Two hundred. Six hundred. In February it was eleven hundred short, and I called out here and they said it was your account.”
“You never told me.”
“Trevor said not to scare you.”
She had her purse open on her arm.
“He brought me copies of these. He said you were coming out here and signing for people and forgetting. He said that’s how it started with Grandma Kilgore. He said if we didn’t do something, somebody was going to take advantage of you.”
Hank said, “Well. Somebody did, apparently,” and laughed by himself.
Kiera took a white envelope out of her purse. It had been folded in half to fit.
“We have an appointment Thursday,” she said. “In Rhinelander. A lawyer, Mr. Kapoor. I was going to bring this by your house tonight, after.” She held it out. “It’s just so I can sign for you, Dad. The building. The account. So nobody else can.”
I didn’t take it.
She put it on the podium, on top of the nine slips.
It was a power of attorney. Four pages, stapled. Every blank had been filled in on a computer, neat, in a font that looked like a bank’s.
“It’s for your protection, Larry,” Trevor said. “That’s all it is. Kee and I talked about it for months.”
“Months,” I said.
“Since the first short check. You think I wanted to do this on my dad’s birthday? You showed up.”
Julia said, “He did show up.”
Hank put the January slip down on the pile.
“Larry, I’ll say it, since nobody else will,” he said. “Maybe it’s time. There’s no shame in it. My brother let his wife do his checkbook his last ten years and he was a happier man for it.”
Kiera was crying a little now, with no noise, the way her mother used to at movies.
“Dad, please. I just want somebody to be able to sign.”
So there it was. My daughter thought her father was going the way his mother went. She’d had six months of short checks and copies of slips to tell her so, and a husband to explain them, and nobody had ever told her to ask me.
I picked up the power of attorney and read the first line.
Principal: Lawrence J. Kilgore.
Somebody had typed the J.
Kwik Trip, Tuesday, 4:12 p.m.
Weston pulled his hand out of my back pocket.
“Grandpa,” he said. “He practiced.”
Kiera said, “Weston.”
“He did, Mom.” He was looking at me, not her. “On Tuesday. At the Kwik Trip, while the gas was going. He wrote your name on the receipt a bunch of times. He said it was a grownup game and don’t tell you.”
Trevor laughed. It came out too high.
“Buddy. I was doodling. You were bored, I was bored.”
“You told me not to tell Mom,” Weston said.
Nobody said anything after that.
I didn’t say anything to any of them either. I left the binder open on the podium and walked out the front door, and Weston came after me in his church shoes, across the gravel to my truck.
It was still light out. June up here, it’s light until almost ten.
I opened the driver’s door.
The pocket was packed full, the way it always is. Two years of gas receipts with my miles on the backs, in my handwriting, in pencil mostly, because pens freeze in January.
The one on top was the newest. Kwik Trip, Woodruff. Tuesday. 4:12 p.m. Regular, $61.40.
That was the day I lent him the truck. I hadn’t put gas in it since.
I turned it over.
There were no miles on the back. There was my name, in blue ballpoint, seven times.
The first two said Larry Kilgore, and they were crossed out hard enough to tear the paper. The next two said Lawrence Kilgore, thin and slanted, like somebody writing on his knee. The last three said Lawrence J. Kilgore, each one better than the one above it, and the J got bigger every time, with a loop at the bottom like a fishhook.
Under the last one, in the same pen: 211. Founders. Sun., hostess?
Weston was standing on the running board, looking over my arm.
“That’s his J,” he said. “He makes it like that on my permission slips.”
The back room
I went back in with the receipt in my hand.
Everybody was where I’d left them. The cousins had drifted toward the bar. Amira hadn’t moved off the stand.
I laid the receipt on the podium next to the binder, face up, the back side showing. Ilene’s page two on the left. The January slip in the middle. The gas receipt on the right.
Three signatures of mine. One real.
Trevor looked at it and started talking before anybody asked him anything.
“That’s a gas receipt,” he said. “That’s from your truck. Which I borrowed. Which you said yes to. Anybody could’ve been in that truck, Larry. Weston’s been in that truck.”
“Trevor,” Hank said.
“Dad, stay out of it. Okay. Okay. I messed around with it. I was showing Weston how old guys sign their names. That’s not a crime. That’s a Tuesday.”
Nobody answered him, so he kept going.
“And for the record, everybody’s got a middle name. I figured you just didn’t use it. You know how many forms I’ve filled out for you? Who drove you to the eye doctor in March? Who did your gutters? Who hauled that dock?”
He was looking around the stand for somebody to nod. The cousins were looking at their drinks.
“You really think anybody in this room believes a guy who eats alone on Father’s Day over me?”
Then he turned to Kiera, and this time he didn’t put his hand on her shoulder.
“Kee. Tell them. You said he’d never look at any of it. You said he signs whatever you put in front of him.”
Kiera stared at him.
“I said he trusts me,” she said.
“Same thing.”
It was very quiet at the stand after that. Out in the dining room somebody’s fork hit a plate.
Hank took his wallet out of his back pocket. He took out his own card and laid it on the podium, right on top of my name on the receipt.
“Run the room on that, honey,” he said to Amira. “And the bar. And whatever the deposit was.”
“Dad, it’s your birthday,” Trevor said.
“I know whose birthday it is.” Hank didn’t look at him. “Go sit in the car, Trevor.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Go sit in the car.”
Julia said, “Hank,” and then didn’t say anything else.
I took the power of attorney off the pile, folded it once, and put it in the binder behind page two, where Ilene would have put it. Then I closed the binder.
“Amira,” I said. “Close two-one-one. Tonight. And I’ll need copies of all nine of those.”
“Copies for what?” Trevor said. “For what, Larry?”
“The sheriff’s office in Rhinelander opens at eight.”
Kiera put her hand on my arm.
“Dad. He’s Weston’s dad.”
“I know who he is,” I said.
I held my hand out to her, palm up. She looked at it for a long time. Then she worked the little brass mailbox key off her ring, the one with the 211 tag Ilene had stamped at the hardware store, and put it in my hand.
Trevor looked at the key. Then at his father. Then he walked out, and nobody went with him.
The front door swung shut behind him. Kiera didn’t go after it.
The window table
The fourth Sunday in July, Weston and I were on the dock by six.
He caught two crappies and a rock bass he wanted to name. I caught a weed.
At five we drove out to the supper club and I asked for the small table by the window. The waitress’s cast was off. She wrote our order with her left hand to show me it worked.
Two walleye, two coleslaw, a root beer, a brandy old fashioned.
Amira nodded at me from the stand. There’s a new card in the rack behind her with a typed label, and it doesn’t have my name on it.
The green card is in two pieces in a coffee can on my kitchen table, next to the blue binder. I open my own mail now. It takes me longer than it took Kiera.
The sheriff’s office sent the slips to the district attorney. Trevor signed a paper there to pay back the $4,260 at two hundred a month. He signed it with his own name. I’ve seen it. There’s a J in it.
Kiera brings Weston up on Sunday mornings and picks him up after supper. She hasn’t come in to eat with us yet.
Tonight her car was in the lot when we came out, engine running. She lifted one hand off the wheel.
I lifted mine back.
I paid cash. Seventy-one dollars. I folded the receipt into my shirt pocket.
On the way home we stopped at the Kwik Trip, and Weston ran the pump while I paid inside.
He was waiting by the truck door when I came out, holding the receipt out to me.
“You have to do the miles, Grandpa.”
I took the pencil off the dash, wrote 41 on the back, and put it in the door.
If this one got to you, call your dad this week and let him tell you about the fish.
For more family drama served alongside a restaurant bill, read the yellow slip that left one boy out and the meal wall that hid $3,017. And when family paperwork turns tense, there’s the sealed envelope with a sale hiding inside.
