I crossed the yard in my house slippers with the envelope held out in front of me like a covered dish, and I knocked on the back screen door with one knuckle. The brisket smell came out through the mesh, smoky and rich. Tammy opened the door with a dish towel on her shoulder and a smile that faded when she saw my face. “Mama,” she said, “we have company.” I am Darlene Fikes, seventy seven years old, and I walked past my daughter into her kitchen, where twelve people sat around a long table and the television was on low.
Kyle sat at the head with a beer, in a Cowboys jersey, and his mother Peggy sat at his right with her glasses on a chain. Everybody turned to look at the old woman in the apron with the envelope. I laid it down on the table in front of Peggy, because she was the one who had asked the question that I had heard through my window, and I said, “Peggy, you asked whether that was my money. It was. It still is. Open it, please, and read it out loud so that everyone can hear.”
Peggy slid the page out with a trembling thumb. Her voice came out small. “Plains Lending, L L C. Holder of the note on the home at forty one twelve Sunset Drive. Notice of intent to enforce.” She stopped, and looked at me over her glasses. “Darlene, this says you are Plains Lending.” The room went silent except for the television. A boy of about ten put down his fork. Tammy took the dish towel off her shoulder and held it against her mouth, and Kyle slowly set down his beer.
A single envelope carried across a back yard gave one diner owner the length of a Sunday supper to bring her daughter back to the truth in Amarillo.
I gave my terms across the brisket, without raising my voice. “Tammy, Kyle, I did not come to throw you out. I bought your note in August so that no stranger could. Here is what I ask. Kyle will stop gambling and attend the meeting in Amarillo on Thursday. You will both sit down with a credit counselor that Peggy and I will choose. Every payment you make from now on goes to me, and I will put each one in a jar for the children. And you will pay me no more rent for my RV, because I am your mother, and not a tenant.”
Kyle covered his face with both hands, and his broad shoulders began to shake. “Darlene, I owe the casino in Oklahoma sixty four thousand dollars,” he said. “I told Tammy it was only the weekend trips. I told myself I would stop the Sunday I won. I have not paid the mortgage since May, and I put the notices in the garage.” Tammy turned to him with her mouth open. “Tammy, I wanted to say it a hundred times. I was ashamed. I thought you would leave me.” She sat very still, and her tears dropped onto her plate.
But humiliation can turn a man wild. Kyle sprang up, snatched the notice from the hands of his mother, and ran for the back door with the page crushed in his fist, meaning to burn it in the barbecue pit. He got through the screen door into the yard. Peggy rose from her chair with a cry. His teenage son Cody blocked the steps with his long arms spread. His uncle Dwayne, a big man in suspenders, came down the porch. And the neighbor from the RV park, old Mr. Tolliver, stepped out from behind the propane tank with his cane raised like a baton.
Kyle stopped in the yard with the page in his fist, in the last hot light of the Panhandle sun, the wind moving the dry grass and the smell of smoke from his own pit. His mother came down the steps with her hand over her chest. “Kyle Dean,” she said, in the voice she had used when he was nine, “you will not burn the house of your wife and call it brave. Give your mother the paper.” He looked at her, and at his son, and at the huge sky. He let go. The page floated down into the palm of his mother.
The consequences were practical and warm. Kyle went to the meeting on Thursday and to every one after it. The credit counselor, a patient woman in Canyon, rebuilt the budget at the kitchen table of Tammy, and Tammy sold her second car and cut up eleven store cards on the same afternoon. The payments went into my jar, and I moved the RV to a quiet corner of the lot, where I paid for my own water. Kyle sold the Charger of his friend, the one he had been driving, and the casino stopped calling.
In the name of my husband Ray, who passed in 2012, I started the Ray Fikes Fund. It pays for past due mortgage help for working families and for culinary school scholarships for the children of truck stop and diner workers, in Potter, Randall and Armstrong counties. In the first year we kept thirty four families in their homes and sent nine students to cooking school. One was a nineteen year old waitress from Vega who had worked a double shift every day since sixteen, and who sat in her first class wearing a crisp white jacket, beaming like a lamp.
On a Sunday in April, I stood at the stove of the old Route 66 Diner, which the new owners had let me use for a one day reunion, flipping chicken fried steak for a line of truckers out the door. Tammy worked the register with her hair tied back, and Kyle bused tables in a clean white shirt, sixty days past the last bet. When the line finally thinned, my daughter slid a slice of coconut cream pie across the counter. “Mama,” she said, “try it. I made it myself.” I took a bite, and it was nearly perfect.