My older sister walked up to our booth while I was cutting my seven-year-old’s pork chop and said, “Your kind eats on the bar side, Darin. This room is for Dad’s birthday.” Then she waved the off-duty deputy over from the door. She’d forgotten who paid the $41,600 that kept her lights on. Dad hadn’t.
Keira looked up from her plate.
“Daddy, are we in trouble?”
She had the birthday card for her grandpa pinned under her elbow so the gravy wouldn’t get on it.
She’d drawn him a walleye with a mustache.
I put the fork down.
“No, bug. Eat your applesauce.”
Tara didn’t go anywhere.
She had on the black blouse she wears when the bank people come, and a name tag that said TARA with MANAGER under it, like there was one soul in Antigo who didn’t know who she was.
Dad built this supper club in 1981 with a borrowed cement mixer and my mother’s tip money.
Tara had been running it since his hip.
I drive a propane truck for the co-op, and I’d come straight off my route, so I probably smelled like it.
“Since when do I need a reservation at Dad’s place?” I said.
“Since tonight.” She looked at my boots, then at the ketchup spot on Keira’s sweatshirt. “Sanjay’s bringing the credit union people at seven. I’m not doing this with you sitting here in that shirt.”
“It’s his birthday, Tara.”
“It’s his party. There’s a difference.”
Keira’s fork stopped moving.
Seventy-six.
Our father was turning seventy-six in the apartment over the bar, and I’d heard about the dinner from Bailey, the waitress, on Tuesday, while she rang up my coffee.
Nobody called me.
Not one person.
Eleven tables in the Lake Room, every one of them set with white cloths and little relish trays, and nobody sitting at any of them but us.
“You’re taking up a booth for six,” Tara said. “Bar side, or go home. Marek?”
Marek Bergmann came over from the front door with his thumbs hooked in his belt.
He’s twenty-nine. He works her door on Fridays for cash, in his deputy shirt, because it keeps the drunks polite.
I taught him to back a trailer in the co-op lot when he was sixteen.
“Darin,” he said. “Come on, man. Don’t make this a whole thing.”
“I’m eating supper with my daughter.”
“She asked you to move.”
“She asked me to leave my father’s birthday.”
Tara laughed once, through her nose.
“He doesn’t even know you’re down here.”
That one went in.
Keira slid the card out from under her elbow and held it in her lap, under the table, where nobody could reach it.
Four years ago the county mailed a letter to this building.
Three years of property taxes nobody had paid. With the penalties it came to $41,600.
Tara kept that letter in the drawer under the hostess stand for five months.
I only found out because Dad called me at eleven at night, and Dad does not call anybody at eleven at night.
I cashed out my 401(k) and ate the penalty on it.
Paid the whole thing in one check at the courthouse on a Wednesday, while Keira, who was three, sat on the counter and worked through the clerk’s peppermints.
A week after that, Dad sat me down at his kitchen table upstairs.
He signed some papers. I signed some papers.
He put my copy in a brown courthouse envelope and slid it across the oilcloth.
“Keep that someplace your sister won’t go looking,” he said.
It had been in my glovebox ever since. Four winters.
“I’m not asking again,” Tara said. “Marek. GET HIM OUT OF MY DINING ROOM.”
Marek put his hand on the back of the booth, about six inches from Keira’s head.
Keira didn’t make a sound.
She just held on to that card.
I took my phone out.
Tara smiled. She thought I was calling somebody to come pick me up.
I sent Dad one line.
Lake Room. Bring your copy.
Then I set the phone face down next to the gravy boat and picked my fork back up.
“Who was that?” Tara said.
“Dad.”
“He’s resting. Don’t you dare drag him into this.”
“You dragged him into it four years ago.”
Her face went flat.
“Eat your chop, bug,” I said.
Keira didn’t. She was watching the swinging door at the back, the one that goes to the stairs.
So was Marek.
The stairs in this building creak on the fourth step and on the ninth, and I’ve known that since I was Keira’s size.
Fourth step.
Ninth.
Dad came through the swinging door in his good blue shirt, the one Tara had bought him for tonight, with his reading glasses already on and the brown envelope in his hand.
He didn’t look at me.
He looked at Marek’s hand on the booth until Marek took it off.
Then he looked at his daughter.
“Dad, I’ve got this,” Tara said. “Go back up. I’ll come get you at seven.”
“Sit down, Tara.”
“The credit union’s going to be here in forty minutes.”
“I KNOW WHO’S COMING. Sit.”
She sat on the very edge of the booth across from Keira, like the seat was hot.
Dad laid the envelope on the tablecloth between the gravy boat and my plate and bent the clasp up with his thumbnail.
“Second page,” he said. “Out loud. I want my granddaughter to hear it from you.”
Tara slid the papers halfway out.
Her eyes found the county stamp at the top.
Under the table, Keira put her hand on my wrist and held on.
Tara’s mouth opened.
Nothing came out of it yet.
The county stamp
She got it out on the second try.
“Quitclaim deed,” Tara read. “Hugh A. Cantu, grantor, of the City of Antigo, Langlade County, for valuable consideration, conveys and quitclaims to Darin H. Cantu, grantee…”
She stopped.
“Keep going,” Dad said.
“The following real estate.” She read the address of the building we were sitting in. Her finger went down the page. “Grantor reserves a life estate in the second-floor apartment.”
Under that was Dad’s signature, and mine, and a notary’s seal. The stamp at the top was from the Register of Deeds, with a date four years old.
Keira let go of my wrist.
“What’s a grantee?” she said.
“It means your dad,” Dad said.
Tara set the paper down on the cloth by one corner. She looked at the clock over the swinging door. It said 6:21.
“Sanjay’s already in the car with them,” she said. “You understand that? They’re on Highway 45 right now.”
“I know where they’re going,” Dad said. “I know what for, too.”
The oilcloth
The oilcloth on Dad’s kitchen table had cherries on it, and a brown ring burned into one corner from a pan my mother set down in 1994. Nobody ever replaced it.
That night four years ago Dad was still on the walker. The hip was eight weeks old. He had the pill bottles lined up along the windowsill, each one with a strip of masking tape on the cap in Tara’s handwriting. MORNING. NIGHT. ONLY IF.
“Your sister does my mail now,” he said. “She does the pills. She’s got a paper from the hospital that says she does me.”
“She’s helping, Dad.”
“She’s helping.” He turned his coffee cup around by the handle. “She kept a letter from the county in a drawer for five months, Darin. Next to the gift certificates.”
By that Sunday, half of St. John’s thought Tara had caught the tax thing herself. She told it at coffee hour. How she’d been up nights going through the books, how she found it just in time. Eleanor from the altar guild brought a pan of bars to the club to thank her for saving it.
I let it go. I had a three-year-old and a route that started at five.
The penalty on the 401(k) was $6,200. The IRS took more in April. I sold the bass boat to cover April.
Dad pushed the papers at me one at a time, and I signed where his finger was.
“What is this?”
“It’s so it doesn’t happen twice.”
Then he put my copy in the envelope, and before he slid it over, he kept his hand flat on top of it.
“If she ever puts a pen in front of me,” he said, “I want you in the room.”
I laughed. He didn’t.
Back in the Lake Room, Tara reached across Keira’s plate and took the deed.
The Percocet
“He was on Percocet when he signed this,” Tara said. She held it up for Marek, like Marek was the judge. “Eight weeks off a hip replacement. I filled every one of those prescriptions. I have the receipts.”
“I wasn’t on anything at that table,” Dad said.
“You don’t remember what you were on. That’s the point.”
Marek took a step back toward the front door. He put his hands in his back pockets.
“Tara, I’m here for drunks,” he said. “This is paper. I don’t do paper.”
“You’ll do what I pay you for.”
“I’ll walk somebody out. I’m not reading anything.”
So he was still hers. He just didn’t want to touch the envelope.
Tara put the deed back in it and kept the envelope against her blouse.
“And I’ll tell you something else, since we’re doing this in front of the whole room.” There was nobody in the room. “I have his power of attorney. Since the surgery. Durable. Anything he can sign, I can sign.”
Dad looked at the tablecloth.
That was news to me. I knew about the hospital paper. I didn’t know the word durable was on it.
Keira had gone back to her applesauce, very slow, one spoon at a time, the way she eats when she’s trying not to be noticed.
I wanted it over. I wanted the card given and the cake cut and my kid out of there before she remembered tonight as the night Aunt Tara called her dad a kind.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. We’ll eat on the bar side. Dad, you come down at seven, you do your thing, Keira gives you the card, we go home.”
Tara looked at me for a long second.
Then she took her phone out and typed with one thumb.
“Sanjay,” she said. “Bring them now. Don’t stop at the Kwik Trip.”
She put the phone away.
“That’s what I thought you’d say, Darin. You always fold.” She turned to Dad and smoothed his collar where the new shirt stuck up. “I’ll bring the pen up to you, Dad. Like always.”
The drawer under the hostess stand
Bailey came through from the kitchen with a water pitcher nobody needed.
She’s twenty-two. She’s been carrying plates in that room since she was sixteen, and she’s the one who told me about the dinner. On Tuesday she’d written Fri, 5:30, Lake Rm on the back of my coffee receipt and pushed it across the counter, and when I said wasn’t it seven, she said, “Five-thirty,” and walked off to the fryer.
I figured she meant beat the crowd.
She filled my glass, which was full.
“She had me move a folder Wednesday,” Bailey said, to the glass. “Out of the office. Drawer under the stand. Same drawer as last time.”
Then she went back to the kitchen.
Tara was in the hall by the coats, on the phone again, telling somebody to come in the side door.
I got up. Nobody stopped me. Marek was looking at the parking lot.
The hostess stand is the same one my mother used to stand at. Same scratch on the front where I hit it with a Big Wheel. The drawer sticks unless you lift it.
I lifted it.
Menus. A roll of quarters. Gift certificate books. A blue folder with the credit union’s pine tree on the front.
COMMERCIAL LINE OF CREDIT. $180,000.
Collateral was the building. The address was typed out the same as on the deed.
Borrower, Hugh A. Cantu. Guarantor, Tara M. Lofton.
I turned the pages standing up. My hands smelled like propane and the paper took it.
Page four was the disbursement. It didn’t go to the club’s account. It went to a checking account in the names of Tara M. Lofton and Sanjay Lofton, joint.
There was a payoff sheet clipped behind it. A truck loan. Two credit cards. A home equity line on their place on Fifth Avenue. The numbers came to a little more than a hundred and forty thousand.
Every page was already signed, in blue ink, in handwriting I know from birthday cards.
There was one yellow flag left, on the last page. OWNER’S ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
Dad’s name was typed under it. A pen was clipped to the folder.
Attorney-in-fact
I put the folder on the table next to the gravy boat, where the envelope had been.
Dad opened it to the first signature and held it at the end of his arm, then pulled it in, then took his glasses off and put them back on.
Hugh A. Cantu, by Tara M. Lofton, attorney-in-fact.
Dated last Thursday.
“Thursday,” he said. “Thursday I was at the clinic in Wausau. All day. They did the thing with the dye. You drove me.”
He turned the page. Same signature. Same date.
He turned to the payoff sheet and read it with his lips moving, the way he reads the propane bill.
“I don’t own a truck,” he said. “Who owns a truck?”
Tara came back from the hall and saw the blue folder.
She didn’t run. She walked, fast, in those shoes, and she put her hand flat on it the way Dad had put his hand flat on the envelope four years ago.
“That’s confidential,” she said. “That’s the business’s file. You went in my drawer?”
“Your drawer,” Dad said.
“It’s for the roof. The roof leaks over the walk-in, ask anybody. The cooler’s from 1998. You want this place to make it to your eightieth? This is how.”
“With your truck.”
“We consolidated. The rate was better. Sanjay did the math. It’s all going back in, it’s all one line, it’s how business works, Dad, you never understood…”
“Then why’d you need it signed at my party?”
She didn’t answer that one.
Dad took his glasses off and looked at me across the booth.
“She came up Monday,” he said. “She said the credit union wanted to shake my hand for forty years in business. Bring a plaque. A photographer from the paper, maybe.” He set the glasses on the folder. “Nobody shakes your hand for forty years. I’ve been in business forty-five. So I went down to the kitchen Tuesday and told Bailey to tell you five-thirty.”
Tara looked at the swinging door to the kitchen like she could see through it.
“You told the help,” she said.
“I told the help.”
That was the dinner. A photographer, a plaque, a pen, and a seventy-six-year-old man in a new shirt signing the last page with everyone clapping. And the man whose name was on the deed eating a hamburger on the bar side, if he came at all.
That’s why I had to be moved before seven. Bar side, or go home.
The bell over the front door went.
Virginia Han
She came in alone, a woman in her fifties in a credit union fleece with a laptop bag on one shoulder and a gift bag in her other hand, tissue paper sticking out.
“Hugh! Happy birthday.” She looked at the empty tables. “Am I early? Sanjay said come straight in. He’s on the phone in the car.”
Sanjay stayed in the car.
Tara was out of the booth before Virginia got to the second table.
“Virginia, hi, you’re fine, you’re perfect. Dad’s just having a little moment, my brother’s here, it’s a family thing, it’s nothing. Let’s go sit at the bar. Bailey’ll make you a brandy old fashioned, sweet, right? We’ll do the paperwork in ten minutes, it’s two signatures.”
“Oh, I don’t want to intrude…”
“You’re not intruding. Marek, get the door to the bar for Virginia.”
I stood up. I took the second page of the deed out of the envelope and the blue folder from under Tara’s hand, which she didn’t expect, and I held both of them out.
“I own the building,” I said. “Nobody asked me.”
Virginia looked at me. Then at the boots. Then she put her gift bag on the next table and took the papers.
She read the deed standing up. She read the stamp. She went to the last page of the folder and read the yellow flag, and then she went back to the first signature and read the date.
“Mrs. Lofton,” she said. “This property is in your brother’s name.”
“It’s a technicality. Dad did a thing on pain pills, we’re getting it undone, there’s a lawyer…”
“Your application says your father owns it. You signed that.”
“Because he does. It’s his. It’s been his since 1981, everybody in this town knows it’s his, he built it, I run it, Darin delivers gas. You want to know where the tax money went, Virginia? Ask my father what he paid me to run this place for fifteen years. Ask him. Forty-one thousand a year. Forty-one. Bailey makes more than me in tips in summer. I ran his bar and his pills and his mail and his surgery and his whole life, and he gives the building to the one who sold his boat. I was going to pay it. I was going to pay all of it back. That’s what the line was for.”
Nobody said anything.
Keira had both hands on the card in her lap.
Virginia zipped the folder into her laptop bag.
“I can’t go forward with this,” she said. “I’m going to have to take the file back to the branch. And I have to write up the signatures, Tara. I don’t get to not do that.”
“You can’t take my file.”
“It’s the credit union’s file.”
Tara turned around.
“Marek. Get him out of here.”
Marek had been at the door the whole time. He looked at me. He looked at the envelope on the table.
“He’s the owner, Tara,” he said.
“I pay you.”
“You pay me to put people out for the owner.” He took his thumbs out of his belt. “I’m not putting the owner out.”
He went and stood by the front door and held it open. Not for me.
Tara stood there in the black blouse.
Then she unpinned the name tag. She came back to the booth and set it on my plate, face up, next to the pork chop, in the gravy.
“Congratulations,” she said. “Payroll’s Tuesday. There’s about four thousand in the account. The walk-in leaks. The cooler’s from 1998.”
She took her purse off the hostess stand and walked out past Marek into the lot where Sanjay was sitting in the car with the engine on.
Virginia picked up her gift bag and set it in front of Dad.
“Happy birthday, Hugh,” she said, and left too.
Dad sat there with his glasses in his hand.
Keira slid out from the booth, came around to his side, and put the card on the tablecloth in front of him, folded, with the walleye on the front.
He opened it. He put the glasses back on.
“That’s me,” he said. “With the mustache.”
Friday, 5:40
Three Fridays later I came straight off my route again.
I gave up my Saturday overtime at the co-op. Somebody has to do the books, and it turns out it’s whoever owns the cooler. Bailey runs the floor. I pay her two dollars more an hour than she was getting, out of my own check until the fish fry catches up. The tax bill comes to my mailbox now. I opened it at my own kitchen table and paid it the same day.
The roof over the walk-in still leaks. I put a pan under it.
Tara hasn’t called. Eleanor from the altar guild has not brought any bars.
Six of the eleven tables in the Lake Room had people at them. The name tag was in my shirt pocket. I’ve never once put it on.
Keira was in the booth with a new card under her elbow, a walleye in a party hat this time, and I was cutting her pork chop small.
The stairs creaked. Fourth step. Ninth.
Dad came through the swinging door in his old flannel and sat down across from her.
Bailey came over with her pad.
“Bar side or Lake Room tonight, boss?”
“This booth,” I said. “It seats six.”
If you’re the one in your family who quietly paid and still got sent to the bar side, I hope somebody upstairs kept their copy.
Family betrayal and money collide in the story of a mother-in-law who called a locksmith while her daughter-in-law’s child was unconscious, and a father who held his child’s power of attorney while ignoring their calls. For another family member who learned the hard way that old debts don’t disappear, read the story of an ex-husband and an $80,640 obligation to his twins.
