Krista slid the contract out of the envelope with two fingers, the way a person lifts a dead mouse by the tail, and she began to read. I watched her lips move. The first page was the cover letter. The second was the purchase agreement. By the third page, she had stopped breathing. Her eyes went down the paper and stopped on a line near the bottom, and then she read it again, and then a third time. “Travis,” she whispered. “Travis, it says eight million, six hundred thousand dollars.” She turned the page toward him with a hand that would not stay still. “It says wire transfer. It says the name of your mother.”
My son leaned across the table and reached for the pages, and I put my palm flat on the stack before his fingers got there. But he pulled his hand back as if the paper were hot. “Mama,” he said, and his voice went up half an octave, “what is this?” I said, “That is what the tag gun was worth, son. The one Clyde laughed at for a week.” Krista put the pages down very gently and pushed her chair back from the table, the legs scraping on the tile, and she looked at her husband as though she had just noticed that he was a stranger.
I told them the rest in the plain voice I use for cattle prices. I said the livestock company paid me five weeks ago. I said I had known about the lease money for exactly eleven days. Then I took a small notepad from my purse, because Clyde taught me to keep books, and I read out the numbers. Thirty one months of lease money, at twenty two hundred dollars. Sixty eight thousand, two hundred dollars. Plus twenty four months of rent I had handed him in cash, nine thousand six hundred more.
A contract for eight million, six hundred thousand dollars was slid across a kitchen table and gave one widow the evening to bring her son home to the ranch.
“Seventy seven thousand, eight hundred dollars,” I said. “That is what the retirement of my husband bought you.” Travis tried to laugh. It came out as a cough. He said I did not understand the paperwork, that he had only moved the money for safekeeping, that the ranch needed it, that I would have lost it all to the taxes. “Safekeeping,” I said. “In your hunting account. Next to the Polaris.” Krista made a small, flat sound in her throat. She said, “He told me it was a bonus. He told me every month it was a bonus.” She was crying, but quietly, the way a woman cries who has been lied to for a long time and is only now finding the exact size of it.
Then Travis did the thing I had been waiting for, the thing a part of me had hoped he would not do. He leaned over the table and lowered his voice and said, “Mama, we are family. You are not going to take this outside the family.” I looked at him a long time. Then I reached into the saddlebag and took out the second paper, the one I had not shown yet. It was a report. The sheriff, I told him, had a copy.
I had gone to the sheriff on Tuesday, after the wind company, and I had gone to a lawyer in Abilene on Wednesday, a woman this time, with a good reputation and a bad opinion of men who forged signatures. Signing as my agent, when I had never named him one, was a felony in the state of Texas. It was not a family matter. It was a crime with a number on it. Travis turned the color of tallow. “But I will tell you what I told her,” I said. “I do not want my son in a cell. I want my money, and I want my house, and I want an apology that I can feel in my chest.”
Travis found his voice then, a thin one. He said, “What about the kids, Mama? What about the girls?” I told him the girls had never done a thing to me, and I would not punish them for the sins of their father. Their college would be paid, all of it. “That is the difference between you and me, son,” I said. “I do not need to take from somebody to give to somebody else.” He did not answer, because there was no answer to give.
So here were the terms, and I set them down on that kitchen table one at a time, like cards. Within thirty days, the Polaris would be sold, and the bass boat, and the truck if it came to that, and the full seventy seven thousand, eight hundred dollars would go back into my account, with interest, by cashier check. The deed in the folder of Krista would be torn in half in front of me, and the power of attorney revoked at the courthouse. And my son and his wife would move out of my house by Saturday. Into the bunkhouse. Four hundred dollars a month, cash, on the first, until every dollar was paid.
Krista was the one who spoke first. She stood, a thin woman in a cardigan, and she tore the deed down the middle, once, and then again, and laid the pieces on the table. “I will take the bunkhouse,” she said. “I will take a second job, if I have to. I did not know, Darlene, but I should have known.” She looked at Travis. “I should have asked where it came from.” Travis said nothing. He sat looking at the table for a very long minute. Then he put his head down on his arms, and he wept, and I let him, and I did not get up to comfort him, because for once I knew that a mother can love a child and still stay in her chair.
On Saturday I moved back into the big house. I carried the saddlebag of Clyde in myself and hung it on the wall of my own bedroom. I put the cot in the barn, next to the welder, because I wanted it close, and I started a new project, a better tag gun, with a spring from a screen door. Travis paid the first installment on the first of the month, in cash, and he knocked before he came in. He is still paying. Last week, from the porch, I saw him out in the pasture with a hand on a calf, working the old gun with one hand, the way his daddy did. The turbines were turning on the ridge. He did not look up. But he was smiling.