…”‘Don’t tell Tom. He’d rather owe the bank than his brother.'”
Tom’s beer stopped halfway to his mouth.
“1984,” Gail said. “We’d been turned down for a mortgage three times. Tom was too proud to ask anyone for help. I wasn’t. I drove out to the elevator and asked Ron for a loan. Ron didn’t loan it to me. He gave it to me. Forty thousand dollars. It was almost everything he’d saved. He told me to tell you it was from my aunt in Omaha.”
Tom set his beer down very slowly. “Your aunt Ruth,” he said. “She left us that money.”
“My aunt Ruth was a waitress who died with four hundred dollars in her checking account,” Gail said. “You never asked to see the will.”
The back room at Applebee’s was completely silent. Somebody’s kid dropped a fork. Nobody picked it up.
My dad kept cutting his steak.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Tom said. His voice had gone small.
“Because for forty years, I’ve listened to you make fun of him at every birthday, every Thanksgiving, every Fourth of July,” Gail said. “The man who gave us our house. The man who kept twelve farms from losing everything in ’96. And he never said a word back. Not once. I promised him I wouldn’t tell. I’m breaking that promise tonight, because I’m sixty-four years old, and I’m tired of watching you be cruel to the best man I know.”
Tom looked at my dad. My dad looked at his plate.
“Ronnie,” Tom said finally. “Is that true?”
“It was a long time ago,” my dad said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
My dad thought about it. “Because you’d have paid me back,” he said. “And then you’d have felt like you had to stop needing anybody. I didn’t want that for you.”
Tom put his face in his hands. My uncle, who has never once in my life been at a loss for words, sat in the back room of an Applebee’s and cried in front of his whole family.
My dad put down his knife and fork, got up, walked around the table and put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He just left it there.
Tom sent my dad a check the next week. Forty thousand dollars, plus “forty years of interest, ish.” My dad tore it up and mailed back the pieces with a note: “Already paid. Come help me fix the barn.”
Tom did. He’s been out to the farm every Saturday since. He’s terrible at fixing barns. My dad says that’s never been the point.
