The father of Brandi is named Leonard Fontenot, and he retired from a Baton Rouge law firm after forty years, and he opened the white envelope as carefully as a man opening an old will. Inside was a single page of heavy paper. He read it standing, with the strawberry cake on his plate and a fork in his other hand. “Gulf Coast Produce,” he said. “Acquisition of Arceneaux Berry Farms. Purchase price, six million, seven hundred thousand dollars.” He put down the fork. “Cornelius. You sold the farm. You sold it in September, three weeks before this dinner, and sat in your chair tonight, and let your son say grace.”
“I did,” I said. “I wished to see what he would say.” Kenny had not moved. My son is forty six, a broad, handsome man in a pressed shirt who sells tractors and has never had to lift anything heavier than a pen. His hands lay flat on the tablecloth on either side of his plate, and they were trembling. “Daddy,” he said. He had to stop and begin again. “Daddy, I did not take the loan to hurt you. I took it for the hospital bills.” “The hospital bills were paid by Medicare,” I said. “I have the statement. They were paid in full in March, the same month you bought the boat.” I smiled at him, I hope, with kindness. “Son, you are a poor liar. You always were.”
Brandi laid her napkin down. She is thirty eight, small and decisive, a dental assistant with a ponytail, and she had been sitting at the elbow of her husband with a face like closed shutters. “Kenny,” she said, “forty thousand dollars. Against the cash value of an insurance policy that your father paid for forty nine years. For his wife. For Mae, so that she would be provided for.” Her voice rose. “And Mae is gone. And the policy was for you, Kenny. For the day he was gone. He told us so at Christmas. You could not wait.” Kenny put his hands over his face. A great shudder went through him, and for a moment I thought he might be sick.
A slice of strawberry cake sat between two envelopes at a birthday supper and gave one berry farmer the evening to bring his son back to the fields.
“I could not wait,” he said, through his fingers, in a muffled voice. “That is the truth, Daddy. I could not wait for any of it. I wanted a different life. I wanted a boat on the lake and a house with a pool. I am forty six and I sell tractors to men who inherited their land. And I said to myself, he is going to leave it to me anyway. What is the harm in a little sooner?” He lowered his hands, and his face was ravaged. “It was the worst sentence I have ever thought, and I thought it a hundred times. And every time, it got a little more reasonable.”
The ceiling fan turned. Outside, the train on Railroad Avenue gave its low double call. Leonard Fontenot sat down heavily in his chair, and I saw that he was an old man, and tired. “Kenny,” he said, “I spent forty years in courtrooms. I have heard every defense there is. And I will tell you the saddest one. It is the man who says he was only borrowing from the future.” He looked at his son in law with the gaze of a man who had cross examined many. “The future does not lend. It only collects.” Kenny nodded, with tears running into his collar. He seemed not to have the strength to do anything else.
I got up. I do it slowly, now, on account of the heart. I walked around the table to my son and put my hand on his head, the way I did when he was small and had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Kenneth,” I said. “Stand up.” He stood. We were the same height, and I looked into his eyes, which are the eyes of his mother, soft and brown and ashamed. “I am not going to forgive you tonight. It would not be honest. But I am not going to disown you, either. We are going to do this properly.” I let go of his hair. “The loan will be repaid within two years. The boat will be sold on Monday.”
He swallowed. “Yes, Daddy.” “And you will give up the power of attorney, in writing, to Mr. Fontenot, who has agreed to hold it.” Leonard raised his eyebrows. “I have not agreed to anything,” he said mildly. “But I will.” Kenny almost laughed, a wet, painful sound. “And Kenneth,” I said, “every spring, the first Saturday of March, you will come to what used to be the home place and pick strawberries with me. Not for money. For the berries.” He stared. “I am selling the farm, but not the three acres by the house. I held those back in the deed. They are for you. If you earn them.”
He wept again, but differently, with his hands open and his face lifted, the way a boy cries at a funeral for a thing that is now beyond help. Brandi put her arm through his. She did not smile. But she stood beside him, a small woman in a plain blue blouse, and I saw her take the weight of her husband. It was a decision. I have seen it in the faces of wives for seventy three years, and I have learned to know it. It is not forgiveness. It is something plainer and harder. It is the choice to stay in the room.
He paid back the forty thousand dollars in twenty two months. The boat sold for less than he owed. In March, at six in the morning, he came out to the three acres in his work boots with a bucket, and I showed him how to pull the berries from the stem with a little twist, so that the green cap stays on.
His first flat looked like a battlefield. By the third, he had it. He knelt in the row in the cold light, the son of an old man, with strawberry juice to his elbows, and ate a berry straight from the plant. “Daddy,” he said, “I had forgotten.” I knew exactly what. “It tastes like Mae,” I said. He nodded and cried into the leaves.