He sat back down instead. He looked Tricia dead in the eye. Then my husband said, “Tricia, this is a real nice house. Do you know what a gift letter is?”
She said she was sure he was going to tell her.
He said, “Ask your lender. It’ll be in your file. Page with a notary stamp on it.”
When a person cannot document where a down payment came from, the loan does not fund. The money has to be traceable and somebody has to sign a letter swearing it is a gift and not a loan, and that letter goes in the file and it stays there for the life of the mortgage.
My brother-in-law asked Buck for that money in 2019. Buck wrote the check and signed the letter at a notary out by the truck stop on his way east, and the letter says what those letters say, that no repayment is expected or implied, and he signed his full name, Delbert Wayne, which nobody has called him since grade school.
Thirty-eight thousand dollars, off the road, in cash he had put by four hundred at a time.
My brother-in-law knew. He has known for six years and he sat in that living room while his wife made a speech about purpose.
Buck did not say the number. My husband has never in his life said a number out loud. He said the words gift letter and then he said, “It is in your file, and I would appreciate it if you would go read it before you tell me about my calling again.”
Then he said the only other thing he said, which is the part I have thought about every day since.
He said, “You want to know what a man thinks about for twenty-six years staring at a highway. He thinks about who is asleep because of the load he is pulling. That is not a joke, Tricia. That is the whole job. Somebody has to be awake at three in the morning so everybody else can quit worrying.”
Her friends were not laughing anymore.
My brother-in-law got up and went to the back of the house and came out with the loan folder, which tells you he knew exactly which drawer it was in, and he put it on the coffee table and could not look at anybody.
Folded into it was the copy Buck kept, and on the back of that copy, in my husband’s terrible handwriting, is a line he wrote to himself at a notary counter in 2019 and never showed a living soul.
Signed it so nobody could ever call it a loan and hold it over them. A gift is only a gift if the man who gave it forgets it. Forget it, Delbert.
He had forgotten it. That is what got me. He would have carried that to his grave if she had not raised a glass of cider at her own baby shower.
Tricia sent a letter three weeks later. A paper one, mailed to the house, four pages, and I am not going to say what was in it except that she used the word ashamed correctly.
They named the boy Wayne. Nobody in that family had told her that was his middle name. She looked it up on the gift letter.
And I quit letting it ride. Twenty-six years I let my husband walk outside and check a trailer that did not need checking.