“…he is parked across the street right now,” Kyle said again, and his voice broke on the last word like a boy of twelve. I went to the front window and parted the curtain with one finger. Under the streetlight sat a gray Buick with its engine running, and behind the wheel the shape of a man, perfectly still. My son stood behind me in his loosened tie, shaking all over. “Mom, I did not want you to find out like this. I was going to fix it by Friday. I had a plan.” I let the curtain fall. “Kyle,” I said, “sit down in your father chair.”
I went upstairs for the checkbook. For the first time I opened the back cover, and there, folded small into the plastic pocket, in Ron neat pencil, was a sheet of lined paper dated October 11. “Sharon, if you are reading this, I did not get to finish. Do not sign anything Kyle puts in front of you. Call Dave Pruitt at Pruitt and Lowe. Kyle owes a man named Gene Haskins two hundred twelve thousand dollars of his retirement savings. I wrote the last check for Gene, not for Kyle. It was meant to be the last one. I wanted Kyle to tell the truth first. I love him. That is why I stopped.”
I read it twice, standing in my nightgown at the top of the stairs. I thought of Ron at the kitchen table every Sunday with his mechanical pencil, adding up the sums of our life, and the sums of our son. I did not feel angry. I felt something heavier, and cleaner. I went down the stairs and walked past Kyle, who flinched, and straight out the front door in my robe and slippers, across the dark lawn to the gray Buick. I knocked on the glass. The window came down, and a tired old man looked up at me.
A blue checkbook, a midnight visitor, and a man parked across the street with the engine running.
Gene Haskins was sixty eight, a retired bus mechanic from Olathe, in a plaid jacket, with the lines of his knuckles still dark from a lifetime of oil. He took off his cap in my kitchen. He did not shout. “Mrs. Mayfield, I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “Ron was the only one who ever called me back.” Kyle had managed his savings for nine years, Gene told me. In the spring Gene discovered that his statements were fiction. All summer he had telephoned Ron, who promised to make it right, and who had, it turned out, been trying.
Kyle sat at the table with his hands between his knees and told it all, to Gene, to me, and to the empty chair beside him. The bad trades in 2019. The client money. The hole that grew. Each time, he said, he told himself one more good week would fill it. Each time, Ron wrote a check and made him promise. “Dad said last time,” Kyle whispered. “He meant it. He told me to go to the firm on Monday and confess. I said I would. He passed the next morning, Mom. I thought God was giving me one more week.” He began to cry. I did not comfort him. I put a cup of coffee in front of Gene.
In the morning, at nine, I called Dave Pruitt, who has been Ron lawyer since 1984. By noon we were in his office, with Kyle in a borrowed jacket. Dave explained it plainly. Kyle would have to report himself to the firm and to the regulators. He would lose his license, perhaps for years. He might face charges, but cooperation counted. He would have to give a full account to every client. Kyle looked at me and said, “Mom?” I said, “Your father wrote Last Time, and I am the one who has to make it so.”
I paid Gene Haskins his two hundred twelve thousand dollars out of Ron estate that Friday, by check, at Dave desk, and Gene signed a receipt. Then I wrote a second paper: a loan to Kyle, in the same amount, secured by his house in Leawood and the Tesla and his share of his father estate, to be repaid at one thousand dollars a month for as long as it took. Kyle signed in four places. He did not argue once. When the pen left his hand, it was the first time in eight years he looked like a man who was telling the truth.
The regulators suspended Kyle for two years. The district attorney, given the cooperation and the restitution, declined to file charges. Kyle sold the Tesla, and his wife Amanda, after a month of silence and a long weekend at her mother house in Wichita, came home. He took a job in the shipping office of a lumber yard in Olathe, at a desk under a poster about safety rules. He goes in at six every morning. He eats his sandwich in the truck and does not complain. His children say he is grumpier and also nicer.
Gene Haskins comes to see me once a month. He brings tomatoes. Last week he told me that Ron once fixed the clutch on his bus at midnight in 1996, for nothing. “Your husband was a good man to be wronged by,” Gene said, and I laughed, because I understood exactly what he meant. We sit on the porch with iced tea, two people who loved the same stubborn man, and we do not say much. It is the most comfortable silence I have shared with anyone since October.
Every Sunday afternoon Kyle comes to my kitchen table. He brings Ron mechanical pencil, which I gave him in March, and the old blue vinyl checkbook, and he balances it, line by line, the way his father did. When he finishes he turns the register toward me. Each week there is one new entry in neat pencil: Payment to Mom, one thousand. Paid. I told him once that an app could do it faster. He looked up from the page and said quietly, “Mom, an app cannot look me in the eye.”