“Is that why the house smelled like boxes when I came home for Easter?” Tony said. “Were we getting evicted?”
Allison started crying.
Not the turn-signal laugh. Real crying. Ugly. Mascara.
“I was going to fix it,” she said. “I was going to fix all of it. If Dean just paid the loans, I could’ve—”
She stopped.
She heard it.
Everybody heard it.
If Dean just paid the loans, I could’ve.
Part Five: Dad
Dad hadn’t said anything.
He was still standing next to the coffee urn. With one hand on the table.
He was looking at Dwayne’s card.
On the napkins. Brown. Curled. The crayon me holding a microphone.
I put the keys in my pocket.
I picked up Dwayne’s card.
I walked over to my father.
“Dad,” I said.
He looked at me.
I didn’t have anything planned.
I want that clear. I’m a comedian. I plan everything. I have notebooks full of bits I’ve never told because I couldn’t find the right ending.
I didn’t plan this.
I reached into the Highlander’s key ring.
I opened the car. With the fob. Beep-beep.
I walked to it. I opened the glove box.
The rubber band was still there.
Allison hadn’t touched it in fourteen months.
I walked back.
I put the stack on the urn table. In front of Dad.
Forty-one parking stubs.
UAMS. West Markham garage. Little white tickets with blue ink. Time stamps. Dates.
Thirty-nine of them with my handwriting on the back.
Mom — chemo 3.
Mom — scan. Good news?
Mom — chemo 11. She threw up in the car. Said sorry 9 times.
Mom — chemo 19. Asked about Dwayne’s tooth.
Mom — last one.
Two of them were blank on the back.
Those were the days I couldn’t write anything.
Dad looked at them.
He didn’t touch them for a long time.
Then he picked them up.
He took off the rubber band.
He started reading.
He read every one.
The pavilion was dead silent. Twenty-five people watching a sixty-eight-year-old railroad conductor read parking stubs.
When he got to the last one, he stopped.
Mom — last one.
He turned it over.
There was something else written on the front. Above the time stamp. In different handwriting. Shaky. Thin.
Dean drove.
Mom had written it.
In the garage. In March. The last day. While I was paying at the machine. I didn’t see her do it. I found it later. Months later. When I was looking for change.
Dad looked at it for a long time.
“Your mother wrote this,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“When?”
“The last day,” I said. “In the car. While I paid.”
Dad put his hand over his mouth.
“Why didn’t you ever show me this?” he said.
I thought about it.
“Because it wasn’t a contest, Dad,” I said.
Then I stopped.
Dad set the stubs down.
He looked at Allison. Crying by the gift table.
He looked at Tony. Holding his phone.
He looked at Dwayne. Holding his notebook.
Then he looked at me.
“I laughed,” he said.
“You did,” I said.
“When the boy poured the coffee,” Dad said. “On your birthday presents. On your son’s card. I laughed.”
I didn’t say anything.
Dad looked at the card in my hand.
The brown, soaked, curled yellow paper.
YOU ARE THE FUNNYEST MAN IN ARKANSAS. EVEN WHEN NOBODY LAFFS.
“Your mother would’ve thrown that urn at me,” Dad said quietly.
Somebody laughed.
Uncle Ray. Then Aunt Faye.
It wasn’t mean. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when something true gets said in a room that’s been holding its breath.
Dad almost smiled.
Then he didn’t.
“She was the one who kept the train on the track,” Dad said. “Linda. Forty-one years. I just yelled all aboard.”
He looked at the stubs.
“When she died,” he said, “I didn’t know how to do the other part. The part where you check. Where you ask. Where you look at who’s actually doing the work.”
He looked at Allison.
“So I listened to whoever was loudest,” he said.
He looked at me.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said.
Part Six: Tony
I didn’t drive home in the Highlander that day.
I want to explain that, because people always ask.
I had the keys. It was my car. My name on the title. Gillian had driven the Fit. We had two cars back. For the first time in fourteen months.
Tony was sitting on the bench at the end of the pavilion.
Alone.
Everybody else had drifted away. Gillian had taken Dwayne down to the river trail with Paige. Dad was talking to Allison by the parking lot. Quietly. The aunts were wrapping up food. Somebody had cut the cake.
Tony was sitting on the bench with his phone in his hand.
Staring at it.
I sat down next to him.
I didn’t say anything.
After a while, he said, “I’m an idiot.”
“You’re twenty,” I said.
Then I stopped.
He laughed. A little. Without meaning to.
Then he put his face in his hands.
“I believed her,” he said. “Everything. For two years. That you thought you were too good for us. That you never helped. That you promised and backed out.”
He shook his head.
“I’d see you at Grandpa’s,” he said. “And I’d think, there’s the guy who abandoned us. I hated you. I actually hated you.”
“I noticed,” I said.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Tony said. “Ever? If you were paying Hendrix? If you paid the rent?”
I thought about it for a long time.
The river was going by below us. Brown and slow. A barge was coming upstream under the I-430 bridge.
“Because I thought if I helped quietly,” I said, “it would just be help.”
Tony looked at me.
“The minute I said it out loud,” I said, “it would be a bill.”
Tony didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t want you to owe me, Tone,” I said. “I wanted you to become a pharmacist.”
Then I stopped.
He was quiet for a long time.
“Eighty-six thousand,” he said finally. “What do I do?”
“Most of it’s not yours,” I said. “The Parent PLUS loans are in your mom’s name. Legally, that’s her debt. Not yours.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Read the promissory note. Every page.”
He almost smiled.
“That’s a character trait the family finds inconvenient,” he said.
I looked at him.
“Mom says that,” he said. “About you. Dean reads everything. It’s exhausting.”
“What about my own loans?” Tony said. “The ones in my name?”
“How much?”
He checked his phone.
“Twenty-two thousand,” he said. “Subsidized and unsubsidized. Federal.”
“That’s real,” I said. “That’s yours.”
“Are you going to pay it?”
I looked at him.
“No,” I said.
He nodded.
He didn’t look angry.
He looked like a man who’d just heard a true thing.
“But I’ll help you figure it out,” I said. “There’s a pharmacy residency at UAMS that does loan repayment. There’s a program for pharmacists who work in rural Arkansas. Hendrix has a financial aid office. They have people whose whole job is this. I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll go with me?”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. “I’ve got a car now.”
He laughed.
A real one.
“Uncle Dean,” Tony said. “The card.”
“What about it?”
“Dwayne’s card,” Tony said. “The one I—”
He stopped.
He couldn’t say it.
“It’s on the napkins,” I said. “Drying.”
Tony looked at the gift table.
At the yellow construction paper. Curled. Brown.
He got up.
He walked to the table.
He picked up the card. By the corners. The way Gillian had.
He looked at the drawing. Me. Microphone. Enormous head.
He looked at the writing inside.
YOU ARE THE FUNNYEST MAN IN ARKANSAS. EVEN WHEN NOBODY LAFFS.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he walked down to the river trail.
To where Dwayne was skipping rocks with Paige.
I watched from the pavilion.
Tony knelt down. In the dirt. In front of Dwayne.
He held out the card.
He said something. I couldn’t hear it.
Dwayne looked at the card. He looked at Tony.
Then Dwayne opened his notebook.
He tore out a page.
He handed it to Tony. With his pencil.
Tony sat down on the riverbank.
He started drawing something.
Part Seven: The Set
Three weeks later, I had a show at the Loony Bin.
A Thursday. The ten o’clock. About eighty people.
I’d been working on new material.
I’d been working on it every night since the reunion. In a notebook at the kitchen table. While Gillian slept and the Fit leaked quietly in the driveway next to the Highlander.
I’d never told stories about my family on stage.
Not really. Not true ones. Fifteen years of jokes about marriage and Arkansas and Walmart and being a dad. Safe stuff.
Nothing about Mom.
Nothing about Allison.
Nothing about coffee on a gift table.
That Thursday, I told it.
Not all of it. Not the Parent PLUS loans. Not the eviction. That’s Allison’s to tell, if she ever wants to.
But the pavilion. The fork on the Solo cup. Before we sing, I’d like to ask my brother to do the right thing.
The gasp. At one syllable.
The coffee.
Dad laughing.
