I was standing in my good shirt with a pie in my hands when my daughter texted that her husband didn’t want me at their first supper in the house I’d put $58,240 into. “Barry says it’s family only tonight, Dad. Please don’t make it a thing.” So I set the pie down and went to the drawer where I keep the notebook.
It was 4:52 on a Sunday.
Supper was at 5:30, and the drive out to their place takes eleven minutes if the light by the grain elevator is green.
I’d ironed the blue shirt twice.
Jeanne always said I ironed like I was mad at the board.
The pie came from the church bake sale. Eighteen dollars, rhubarb, and I’d let two people at coffee hour think I made it.
I read the text again.
Family only.
I’d been her family for forty-nine years. I taught her to back a trailer down the boat ramp. I drove her forty miles each way to the orthodontist every month of eighth grade.
I typed “Ok” and erased it.
I typed “Did I do something” and erased that too.
The phone buzzed before I could try a third time.
It wasn’t Marcy.
It was Gemma, who’s twelve and has a phone because I bought her one for her birthday.
“Grandpa are you still coming? Dad was on the phone with the bank and he said your name like FIVE times.”
I read that standing up.
Then I sat down.
My name. To a bank. On a Sunday.
I’ve never been ON that house. That was the whole arrangement. Barry’s credit went bad when his trailer business folded, so I covered the down payment and the closing, the deed went in their names, and I said fine.
Gemma doesn’t make things up.
She repeats them.
The drawer under the microwave sticks when it’s humid. I had to jiggle it.
The notebook was under the warranty for the dishwasher. Green, spiral, the kind Jeanne kept the egg money in.
Every check since the closing was in there. Every transfer. The date, the amount, and what Marcy said it was for.
I’ve never known what to do with a thank you, so I wrote things down instead.
Down payment. $31,000.
Closing costs. $6,180.
The furnace in January, because the inspector missed it. $4,900.
Gemma’s braces. $3,350.
Barry’s truck payment, “just till the new job starts.” Eleven months of it.
Their phones. Their internet. Their homeowner’s policy, which I put on autopay myself in May because Marcy kept forgetting and the agent kept calling ME.
At the bottom of the last page I’d added it up in pencil.
$58,240.
Ninety-six payments in thirteen months.
I didn’t call Marcy.
I didn’t call Barry. Barry answers a phone like you’ve interrupted something important, and in eleven years I’ve never found out what.
I wrote back to my granddaughter.
“Not tonight, kiddo. Eat a roll for me.”
Then I put the pie in the fridge and hung the tie on the back of the chair.
I didn’t sleep much.
At 9:05 the next morning I walked into the credit union in Wahpeton with the notebook in a bread bag so the rain wouldn’t get it.
Rekha Lindahl has run that branch since before Jeanne got sick. She came to the funeral. She brought a hotdish, and nobody ate it, because there were thirty-one of them.
“Dennis,” she said. “You look like you slept in a chair.”
“I did.”
I opened the notebook on her desk to page one.
“I want to stop all of it,” I said. “EVERY ONE OF THESE. Anything with my name on it that pays for that house.”
She didn’t ask why.
She put her reading glasses on and started typing.
It took her twenty-five minutes. The printer behind her ran four times.
Every so often she read a line out, and I found it in the notebook and said yes, and she clicked.
Truck payment. Yes.
Internet. Yes.
The homeowner’s policy. She stopped on that one.
“If this lapses, they’re uninsured.”
“THEN BARRY CAN PAY IT,” I said.
She clicked.
My hands stayed flat on her desk the whole time, the way they used to sit on the wheel in a hailstorm.
When she finished, she lined her printout up beside my notebook.
Ninety-six lines on hers.
Ninety-six on mine.
To the penny.
I don’t know why that was the part that got to me. Nobody had to thank me. The numbers just agreed with me for once.
Then Rekha held on to the last page.
“There’s one more,” she said. “It’s not in your notebook.”
“Everything’s in my notebook.”
“Not this. It came in Thursday, from Barry’s lender. They want us to verify an account.”
“What account?”
She looked at the glass in her office door, then back at me.
“One with your name on it, Dennis. I’ve known your handwriting for twenty-six years.”
She laid the page face-down on the desk and kept two fingers on it.
“So before I turn this over,” she said, “I need you to tell me you never signed ANYTHING for Barry Pruett.”
Ninety-seven
“I never signed a thing for Barry,” I said. “Not a birthday card.”
She turned it over.
It was a form from a lender in Fargo. Request for Verification of Deposit. My savings account, the one ending in 0417, the one Jeanne’s life insurance went into. Under that, a loan number, and a box that said what the loan was for.
Business loan. $44,000. Borrower, Barry Pruett. Co-borrower, Dennis Holloway.
My address. My birthday. My Social Security number, all nine digits, typed in a font I didn’t own.
Down at the bottom it said the borrower’s signed authorization was on file with the lender and enclosed.
“Enclosed,” Rekha said. “It wasn’t. They sent me the request and kept the signature page. I don’t release a member’s balance on a form I can’t see.”
“So you didn’t tell them anything.”
“I told them nothing. I’ve had it in my drawer since Thursday.”
There’s a butterscotch dish on the corner of her desk that has been there since the Clinton administration. I took one and didn’t open it.
Forty-four thousand dollars.
The notebook was still open on the desk between us, ninety-six lines and a pencil total, and this was the ninety-seventh line, and I hadn’t written it.
“They say they have your signature,” Rekha said.
“Then whose signature do they have?”
The boat ramp
The last time Barry asked me for anything to my face was the Fourth of July, at the lake.
We’d brought the pontoon down to the public ramp. Marcy was in the truck, backing it, because I taught her at fourteen and she’s still better at it than him. Gemma was on the dock with a bag of sunflower seeds.
Barry stood next to me with his hands in his back pockets.
“There’s a guy in Breckenridge selling off six trailers,” he said. “Enclosed cargo, two flatbeds. Good stock. I could be back in business by fall.”
“Good for you.”
“I’d need somebody to go in on it with me, Denny.”
He calls me Denny when he wants something. Jeanne used to call it his sales voice.
“I’m already in on your house,” I said. “I’m in on your truck. I’m in on the girl’s teeth.”
“That’s family stuff. This is business. This pays you back.”
“No,” I said.
He smiled like I’d said something about the weather.
“No harm in asking,” he said, and went to help Marcy with the straps.
That was July. Nobody brought it up again, and I wrote nothing down, because no money moved.
But I did write down May.
May 14 was a Wednesday. Marcy came by after work with a manila folder and a stack of papers, and she was in her scrubs from the clinic, and she was tired.
“It’s the homeowner’s,” she said. “The agent wants the autopay on your account since you’re paying it anyway. I flagged where you sign.”
She’d stuck little yellow flags down the side of the pages. I signed by every flag. I don’t read insurance papers, I never have. Jeanne read them.
Marcy hugged me at the door. She doesn’t do that much.
I wrote it in the notebook that night, the way I write everything. Then I forgot it, because the agent quit calling, and that was the point.
Rekha was still waiting with her two fingers on the corner of the form.
“I’m going to ask the lender for the authorization,” she said. “In writing. They’ll have to send it to me before anything else happens.”
“And then?”
“And then we both look at it. Don’t call him, Dennis. Let me get the paper first.”
Monday, 6:40
I didn’t call him.
Barry called me. Twice before noon on the house phone, which I don’t answer, and once at three, which I let ring out while I stood in the kitchen and counted.
At 6:40 Marcy’s car pulled into my driveway.
She didn’t come to the back door like she always does. She knocked on the front, like a salesman.
“Dad. The agent called me at work. The policy bounced.”
“I know.”
“You KNOW? We have no insurance on the house. Gemma sleeps in that house.”
“Barry can pay it.”
“Barry can’t pay it this week, that’s the whole thing. He’s got a meeting in Fargo on Wednesday. It’s the business. It’s him getting back on his feet. Couldn’t you have waited till Thursday to have your little fit?”
She was standing on my porch in her scrubs, and her car was still running.
“Did Barry put my name on a loan?” I said.
She looked at me like I’d asked if the moon was hollow.
“No. Dad. You’re not on anything. That was the whole arrangement.”
“Ask him.”
“I don’t have to ask him. I know what’s in my own house.”
I’d taken the pie out of the fridge when I saw her car. Rhubarb doesn’t keep. I held it out to her, still in the plastic carrier from the bake sale.
“For Gemma,” I said.
She took it, because she was raised right, and she walked down the steps with it.
“You’re doing this because he didn’t want you at supper,” she said. “That’s all this is. You’re seventy-four and you’re sulking with a checkbook.”
“Ask him about Wednesday.”
“Barry said you’d do this. He said you’d make it a thing.”
She got to the bottom step and stopped.
Then she set the pie on my porch rail and got in the car and backed out of the driveway perfectly, the way I taught her.
2:15, Tuesday
Rekha called at 1:50.
“It came,” she said. “Can you come in?”
I was there by 2:15. She had her office door shut and the blinds on the glass turned, which I’d never seen her do, not even when the Sorensons were going through it.
The fax was two pages. She’d laid them on her desk side by side, and next to them she’d put my signature card from the file, the one I filled out in 1999 when Jeanne and I moved our accounts over from the bank.
Page one was the last page of a loan application. Co-borrower’s certification. A paragraph of fine print about how everything above was true and complete.
Page two was an authorization to release my account information to the lender.
Both of them signed Dennis Holloway.
I looked at it a long time.
My D starts at the bottom, not the top. I loop it back on itself because my third-grade teacher in Fairmount made us practice cursive on butcher paper and I never got over it. The two L’s in Holloway lean different ways. Jeanne used to say my name looked like it had been in a fight.
That was my name. In my hand. Twice.
“I know,” Rekha said. “I knew on Monday. I’ve seen that D on four hundred deposit slips.”
“I didn’t sign a loan.”
“I believe you didn’t know you did.”
Under each signature there was a date, and the dates were in my hand too. I write dates with dashes. Five, dash, fourteen, dash, the year.
And at the very top edge of page one, where the fax machine had copied it gray, there was a little strip of something stuck to the paper. A narrow shape, folded over the corner.
Rekha put her finger next to it without touching it.
“Somebody flagged this page,” she said.
I opened the bread bag.
May 14
The notebook is in order. It’s always in order. I went to the May page with my thumb and found the line in my own pencil.
May 14. Homeowner’s. Autopay set up from my checking. $1,412 a year. Signed 4 places at M’s yellow flags. “For the agent.”
Four places.
Rekha pulled the insurance company’s autopay form up on her screen. The agent had sent it over in May to set the draft up, and the credit union keeps a copy.
It had two signature lines on it.
Two.
“An insurance autopay takes your signature once, maybe twice,” she said. “It doesn’t take four.”
I laid the fax pages down on top of the notebook, the signature on page one right over the pencil line that said 4 places. Same week, same pen, I’d bet, the blue one that lives in the cup by the phone.
I’d sat at my own kitchen table with my daughter standing at my shoulder in her scrubs, and I’d signed by every flag she put there, and two of those flags were Barry’s loan.
“Do you want me to verify the account?” Rekha said.
“No.”
“Then you need to tell them yourself. In writing. That you revoke the authorization and you don’t consent to be a co-borrower, and that you signed what you were told was an insurance form.”
She slid a pad of credit union letterhead across the desk. Then a pen.
I wrote it out. It took me three tries, because the first one said things about Barry a lender doesn’t need to read, and the second one said things about Marcy that I couldn’t stand to see in my own handwriting.
The third one was five sentences. I signed it. I put the date with dashes.
Rekha read it, nodded once and fed it into the fax herself. Then she photocopied the May page of my notebook and faxed that too.
At 3:10 her phone rang. She listened, said “That’s correct” three times and “No, he was sitting right here” once, and hung up.
“The closing’s off,” she said. “They’re pulling the file. They’ll call the borrower.”
“When?”
She looked at the clock over the door.
“They said within the hour.”
The counter on Coulee Road
I left the credit union at 3:30.
I could have gone home. I sat in the lot for a while with the bread bag on the passenger seat. Then I drove out to their place, and the light by the grain elevator was red, and I sat through it.
Barry opened the door before I knocked. He’d seen the car.
He had his phone in his hand.
“You’ve got some nerve,” he said. “You’ve got some goddamn nerve, Dennis.”
I didn’t say anything. I stepped past him into the kitchen, because the kitchen is where I paid for the furnace.
Marcy was at the counter. There was a manila folder on it, thick, with a clip at the top and a lender’s logo on the cover. Beside it, my rhubarb pie with one slice gone.
“The lender just called,” Barry said. “You know that? Wednesday’s dead. Six trailers, dead. The guy in Breckenridge has another buyer. You did that. You and your church lady at the credit union.”
“Barry,” Marcy said.
“No. He’s going to hear it. That money is SITTING there, Dennis. Jeanne’s money. It’s sitting in a savings account in Wahpeton doing nothing. Earning, what, two percent? I’d have paid it off in three years. You’d never have had to touch it. You’d never have even known.”
I opened the notebook to May and put it on the counter next to the folder.
“I asked you at the lake,” Barry said. “Like a man. To your face. And you said no like I was some kid asking for the keys. So yeah. I found another way. I’m trying to run a family here.”
“What’s that?” Marcy said.
She was looking at the notebook.
Barry kept going.
“And then the bank calls me Sunday, says the credit union won’t verify, says they need to hear from the co-borrower, and what am I supposed to do? Have you over for pot roast so you can ask me what’s in the folder? You’d have asked. You always ask.”
Marcy read the May line out loud.
“Signed four places at M’s yellow flags.”
She put her hand flat on the page.
“You told me two of those were the agent’s,” she said. “Barry. You said the agent needed it in two places for the escrow.”
Barry looked at her. Then he looked at me, and he laughed, short, through his nose.
“Oh, come on, Marce. You knew what they were.”
Nobody said anything.
“You read every page in that folder before you flagged it,” he said. “You always read everything. You told me it was fine because he’d never notice and we’d pay it back before he did. Tell him. Go ahead and tell him.”
Marcy didn’t tell me anything. She looked at the pie.
Upstairs a door opened. Gemma was at the top of the stairs in socks, holding her phone, the one I bought her.
“Go back to your room, honey,” Marcy said.
Gemma didn’t move.
I picked up the notebook. I closed it and put it back in the bread bag. I took the closing folder off the counter too, because my name was in it, and Barry didn’t try to stop me.
At the door Marcy said it to my back.
“I’d have paid you back, Dad. I know how to count too.”
The tie on the chair
Two Sundays later it was 4:52 and I was ironing the blue shirt.
Once, this time.
The homeowner’s policy is back on. I called the agent myself the next morning and put it on my own card, in my own name as the payer, and I told him if anybody brings me papers to sign about it, he’s to call me first. I wrote it in the notebook. $1,412. Then I wrote the word Gemma after it, because that’s what it was for.
Barry hasn’t called. Marcy texts about Gemma’s schedule and nothing else, and she signs them M.
I bought another rhubarb pie. The church had a second sale. I didn’t let anybody think I made it.
At 5:20 Marcy’s car pulled into the driveway, and Gemma got out with her backpack and came up the steps to the back door, the way her mother used to.
Marcy didn’t get out. She rolled the window down.
“What time should I come back?”
“Seven,” I said.
Then I went in, took the tie off the back of the chair, and set a third plate, in case.
If you’ve got a notebook like Dennis’s in a kitchen drawer, keep it. And if you know somebody who keeps one, send them this.
When family ties get tangled with money, the truth can be hard to ignore – see what happens in “Dad Had Me Sign a Bank Paper at Sixteen. Now Mom Wants $64,000” and “My Husband Showed Up Wanting Supper. Dad’s Lawyer Was Holding His $60,000 Note”.
