Part 3 — Side B Ends
The hiss on the tape ran for what felt like a full minute, and nobody at Christmas dinner so much as lifted a fork.
Then a second voice came out of Carlas kitchen stereo, softer, as if Joni had leaned in close to the microphone and turned away from the room.
“Carla, this part is just for you. I know about the money.”
My sister-in-law sat down hard in her chair. Her mother Bea reached across the table and took her hand.
“I know you borrowed against the house in the spring. Twenty-eight thousand dollars, and the man calling every night. You never told me, but he called my work by mistake.”
“I changed the beneficiary to Gil because he is my husband. That is the law, and it is also right. But I did not change one more thing.”
“Gil, the last thing on this side is where the form is. The policy papers are in the blue tin on the hall closet shelf, under the tape that is number one. Please keep them with you.”
Carla was crying openly now, with her hand over her mouth.
“Carla, you called the insurance company because you were frightened, not because you were wicked. I am not angry. Be honest with Gil tonight, and he will do right by you.”
Joni breathed in, the way she always did before a song, and for the first time in thirty years she sang, a few shaky bars of the first song she ever put on a tape for me.
The tape clicked off. Nobody said a word for a long while.
Carla pulled Jonis earrings from her ears and laid them on the tablecloth. She gave me the credit card and the car keys too, and she told me everything about the loan and the calls.
I did not shout. I took the earrings and pressed them back into her palm. Joni had meant her to have them.
The next week, Bea and I sat down with the insurance company and a lawyer in Terre Haute. The one hundred fifty thousand dollars came to me as the form on file said it must.
I paid off the lender in full, in Carlas name and in Jonis memory, and I asked for one thing in return: that she repay me a little each month, no interest, as long as it took.
In spring she came to the house with a casserole and a shoebox. Inside were tapes she had not burned after all, five of them, hidden in her own closet that long weekend because she could not do it.
We played one in the truck on the way to the cemetery. Joni breathed in before the first song, and for the first time in months, Carla and I sang along.