Doug drew the second sheet out from under the checks and held it at the length of his arm. The letterhead belonged to a large seed company in Des Moines, with a green corn leaf in the corner. He read the figure, then the date, then the name at the bottom, Moeller Seed, sold. He read it a second time, aloud, in a whisper. “Thirteen million one hundred thousand dollars.” He turned to his wife. “Sharon. Your father sold the dealership. And you told me last week he could not manage his own pills.” The furnace clicked. Out in the yard, a combine rumbled on the gravel and faded away.
Sharon had lost every drop of color. “Dad,” she said, “this must be a mistake.” I said, “It is the opposite of a mistake, honey. I signed it in October. I wanted to know whether my daughter loved me, or what I might leave behind.” I pushed the check copies toward her across the table, eleven of them, in a fan, like a hand of cards. “Number 2201. Number 2202. Number 2207. Forty four thousand dollars, eight months, all cashed at the cage in Riverside.” I looked at her. “I have never been to Riverside in my life. And neither did your mother, in fifty two years.”
Doug put the checks in a stack. He squared the edges against the table with great care, the way a man does when he cannot trust his hands to do anything else. “Thursdays,” he said. “Book club. You said you were at book club every Thursday night.” Sharon began to speak. “Doug, I can explain.” He said, “You have a book club in a casino?” His voice cracked on the last word. Then, to my surprise, Doug slowly turned and looked out the window, at the cornfields stripped bare by the harvest, and said, almost to himself, “We have a mortgage. We have two kids in college.”
Eleven forged checks tucked under a seed company contract turned a kitchen binder meeting around and gave one farmer the Saturday to bring his daughter back from the casino.
Sharon let out a sound I will remember until my last day. It was not quite a sob. It was the sound of something heavy being set down after years of carrying. “Dad,” she said, “I started with twenty dollars. A girlfriend took me, for her birthday. I won two hundred. And I thought, this is the answer.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “I lost it all the next week. And I thought, I can win it back. And I took a check from the book you gave me, only one. And then it was easier.” She looked at me with swollen, pleading eyes. “Daddy. I am so sick.”
I had known, in some small cold room of my heart, since the day the first check came back. A man does not farm for fifty years without learning to read the signs of a failing crop. I got up from the table, slowly, because of my hip, and I went around to her chair. I put my hand on the back of her head, the way I did when she was small. “Sharon,” I said, “I am going to say something now, and I want you to hear every word. You are not a thief. You are sick. And sick people can get well.”
She turned in her chair and put her arms around my waist and wept into my shirt. Doug stood by the window. After a moment, he came over, awkwardly, and put a hand on her shoulder. We stayed that way for a long time, the three of us, in the kitchen where Ruth and I had eaten supper for fifty two years. The old clock above the stove ticked. The agenda about Linn Manor, still taped to the refrigerator, curled at the corner. I reached out with my free hand and tore it off, and folded it into a small square, and put it in my pocket.
I laid out the terms. Sharon would enter a treatment program in Iowa City, as soon as a bed opened, which my lawyer arranged for the following Monday. The remaining accounts would be placed under the control of a trust company, with Doug and me as signers. The casino would be asked to bar her from entering. Sharon would repay what she could, over years, and I would forgive the rest, on one condition. “You will call me,” I said, “every night, from wherever you are. Even if it is only to say good night.” She nodded, through her tears. “Every night, Daddy.”
She went on a Monday. Doug drove her in the old Buick, with a small suitcase and a photograph of Ruth in a plastic frame. I stood on the porch in my cardigan and watched them go down the gravel road until the dust settled. Then I went inside and sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a legal pad, and I made a list. I wrote down the names of every person in the county who had ever bought a bag of seed from me. I began to write them letters. It seemed a good way to spend the winter.
The first call came at nine that night. She was crying, and so was I. The second came the next evening, and the third. For ninety days, my daughter called me every night from a green room in Iowa City, and we talked about the weather, and the television, and the price of corn. Sometimes we did not talk at all. We only listened to each other breathing. On the fifty first night, she said, “Daddy, I think I can see the bottom of it now.” I said, “Honey, I think the bottom is a good place to stand.”
She came home in the spring, thin and clear eyed, with a coin in her pocket that said ninety days. Doug picked me up on the way and we drove out to the field where I had sold my first bag of seed corn out of the back of a Chevy. The ground was black and wet. Sharon knelt and picked up a handful of it. She let it run through her fingers. “It smells like you,” she said. I laughed. She said, “It smells like starting over.” And above us, the early meadowlarks sang in the new green, as if they had never doubted it for a moment.