Gary slid the paper out slowly, the way a man draws a splinter. It was thick, cream colored, with the letterhead of the logistics company in Chicago in raised blue ink at the top, and he held it up to the window so that the winter light came through. “Wolverine Pallet,” he read aloud, “has been acquired by Meridian Freight Systems. Purchase price: eight million one hundred thousand dollars. Seller: Leonard Dykstra.” He stopped. He read it a second time under his breath. Then he laid it flat on the table, and put his hand on top of it as if it might blow away, and looked at me with a face I had not seen on my son since he was a boy of eight.
“Dad,” he said, “you sold the company?” I said, “In September.” He said, “And you did not tell me.” I said, “No.” He said, “Why not?” I looked at him, my son, fifty years old, in a dealership polo shirt, with gray in his sideburns, and I answered him honestly. “Because I wanted to know whether you were coming for the father or for the pallets.” He flinched as if I had slapped him. “And then,” I said gently, “a letter came from a bank in Grand Rapids. And I understood I did not need to wait any longer.” Jenny, at the end of the table, had not moved at all.
She had folded her hands over her printed agenda. She is a handsome woman of forty eight with short dark hair and a careful way of speaking, and she looked at me without blinking for a long time. Then she said, in her professional billing voice, “Leonard, you are tired. You were very ill.” I said, “I had a stroke two years ago, Jenny. I recovered. I read the bank records last night with my lawyer, line by line. I signed nothing. I was in Bronson Hospital in March, in a rehab bed, and the power of attorney you used was dated the fourteenth of that month. It was notarized in Portage. Nine miles away.”
A pontoon calendar on a dining room wall brought a creased cream letterhead into the winter light and gave one pallet maker the Sunday to bring his son back to the shop floor.
Gary looked from her to me. He did not say anything. “Jen,” he said, very low, “the account. Two two eight zero.” She said, “It is our joint account, Gary. I told you. It is how we paid for the pontoon.” He said, “You told me you got a bonus.” She said, “It was a bonus. Of a kind.” The calendar on the wall flapped in the furnace air, and the picture on it, a white pontoon boat in blue water, seemed to me suddenly the most obscene object I had ever seen. Gary rose from the table and walked over and took it down from its nail. He turned it face down on the counter.
“Dad,” he said, with his back to us, “I have to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth.” I said, “Of course.” He said, “Did you ever think it was me?” I understood the question at once. “No,” I said. “Not for one moment. You are not capable of it.” He bowed his head. “I am,” he said. “I am capable of not looking. I knew the house was too nice. I knew the boat was too expensive. And I did not ask, Dad, because I did not want to know.” He turned. His eyes were wet. “That is the thing I am ashamed of.”
I got up. My legs, which had been so steady all morning, were suddenly unreliable, and Gary came across the room and took me under the elbow and held me as I sat down in the good chair by the window. “Sit with me, son,” I said. He pulled a kitchen chair close and sat knee to knee, as he had at the hospital after the stroke, when I could not find my words and he had held my hand for three days. “I forgive the looking away,” I said. “That is a human thing. The rest is not for me to forgive. The rest belongs to the bank, and to the law, and to Dorothy, who would have thrown the dishes.”
The rest went the way these things go. My lawyer met the three of us in his office on Monday. I did not wish to press hard charges, and I said so, but I would not withdraw them either. Jenny entered a plea in the spring, with restitution of seventy four thousand dollars, and a period of probation. She agreed to sign away any claim to my property. She did not look at me once at the hearing.
Gary moved out of the big house in April. He rented a small apartment on Westnedge, near the dealership, and he took the pontoon calendar with him, folded in a drawer. “To remember,” he said. He came to my place on Sundays, to the old house on Portage Street that Dorothy and I paid off in 1996, and we sat in the kitchen with a pot of coffee and the radio on low. At first he talked about nothing, about the weather, about a customer who bought a truck. Then, in June, out of nowhere, he said, “Dad, will you teach me how pallets are built?”
I took him to the old plant on Portage Street, which the logistics company had kept running, and a foreman who remembered me let us have a corner of the shop floor and a pile of pine stringers. I showed Gary how to square a stringer and set the deck boards, and how to drive a nail so the wood would not split. He built one that afternoon, forty eight by forty, plain and crooked. It wobbled when he set it down. We both looked at it. “It is terrible,” he said. I said, “It is a little terrible.” He grinned, the first real grin I had seen on him in two years.
He built another, and another, and by August they were square. I took the first good one home in the bed of my truck and set it by the back door, under the maple, where Dorothy used to hang the wash. On Sunday evenings, when the light goes gold and the crickets begin, Gary and I sit on the back steps with our coffee and look at the pallet, and say nothing, because between a father and a son who have found each other again, there is not much that needs saying. Only a plain thing, well made, and set where it can be seen.