I peeled the masking tape from the spare key with my thumbnail, there at the window of the county treasurer, and read the number in the square printing of Arnold. 17. Nothing else. Gerald stood with his hands hanging, and Kathy bounced the baby on her hip, and the pale blue paper lay on the counter beside my own title, faded as a pressed flower. I knew what the number meant before my mind caught up. For thirty years, Arnold had kept the important things in a box at the Seward State Bank.
“Box seventeen,” I said. “The safe deposit.” Gerald stared at me. “Mom, I have been to that bank a hundred times,” he said. “Dad never told me.” I picked up the key and the blue title and put them in my purse, and I told the girl at the window that I would be back for my plates. She nodded and wrote something on a pad. Then the three of us, and the baby, walked across the square to the bank, and I asked the manager, a young man named Teague, if he would be so kind as to find a box.
He took a long time. The key of Arnold did not fit the lock of the box, because of course it was a key to something else, but Teague had a master, and a form of mine, and my identification, and the certificate of death. He left us in a small paneled room with a lamp. When he brought the long gray tin, my heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth. Gerald put a hand under my elbow. I lifted the lid.
On top lay a manila envelope, and in it a letter from the Commerce Bank of Kansas City, dated July of 2014. Release of Security Interest. The loan against the red Chevy had been satisfied in full, it said, and the bank relinquished all claim. I read it aloud, slowly. Underneath were the original title and a bill of sale from a man named Walter Janssen. It told the whole story. Arnold had bought the truck from a friend who still owed money on it, and had paid off the loan of the friend and the price together, in cash.
An honest man leaves behind his papers the way a good farmer leaves his fences, straight and mended, for the next to find.
“The bank in Kansas City never cleared its old record,” I said. “It still shows them as the first claim on the truck, for a debt that was paid ten years ago.” Gerald let out a breath that seemed to come from his shoes. “That is the second claim on the paper I brought,” he whispered. “I thought it was something Dad did. I thought he had borrowed against it. I was so afraid. I sat in the parking lot of the treasurer for an hour.” He ran his hand across his face. “I took the other loan, Mom. Not him.”
I looked at my son. He is forty six years old, with the neck of a farmer and the large ears of his father, and he stood in that paneled room like a boy caught with his hand in the jar. “Tell me,” I said. He told me. Hail had taken the roof off his hog barn in February. The insurance deductible was three thousand dollars, and the bank would not wait. He had been ashamed to ask. He had found the truck title in the glove compartment, and a man at the title loan shop had said that nobody checks.
Kathy, standing in the corner, burst into tears. She had not known. She had thought the money came from the sale of a calf. She said it quietly, with the baby asleep on her shoulder, that she was more upset with herself than with anyone. For two months she had wondered why her husband had stopped sleeping. “Why did you not ask your mother?” she said to Gerald. He looked at me with an expression I had waited thirty years to see. “Because she would have said yes,” he answered. “And I could not stand it.”
I closed the lid of the tin. I told them what we would do. I would take the release letter to the county and have it recorded that afternoon, so the old claim would be wiped from the record once and for all. Gerald would repay me the three thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars that I had paid to the title shop, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, with no interest, by check, on the first. And he and Kathy would sit down with the banker, Teague, and a pencil, and learn how to ask for help.
We did all of it that week. The clerk at the county seat stamped the release paid in clear black ink, and the girl at the window printed my plates without a word. The title came back clean, with the name Fern A. Schroeder and no one else. When I walked out into the sunshine with the sticker in my hand, I felt the weight of fifty one years lift. Arnold had left me a truck, and a box, and a lesson. I only had to open the right drawer to find it.
Gerald brought the first check on the first of May, folded in an envelope, with a note. For the truck, for the box, for the cap, it said. I put it in the coffee can on top of the refrigerator and did not touch it. In June his hog barn had a new roof, paid for by a loan from the bank at five percent, with Kathy as co signer, and I was invited to the raising. I drove there in the red Chevy with the radio on, and the seed cap on the dash.
On Sundays, now, Gerald drives me to church in that truck, and I sit on the passenger side with my purse on my knee. The baby sits between us in a car seat, kicking. We have a rule that no one touches the cap on the dashboard. When we pull into the lot at the church of St. John, people look. Gerald turns off the key, sets the brake, and goes around to open my door. He has learned the way a man helps his mother down. He takes my elbow, and he does not let go.