The first page was a foreclosure notice with Travis’s name on it. The second was a bank statement showing a withdrawal of sixty-one thousand dollars from a retirement account. The third was a cashier’s check made out to Travis’s mortgage lender. Ida held all three up so the nearest tables could see. “In March,” she said, “your coin went to zero. You called me crying because they were going to take your house with your boys inside it. I didn’t have that money, Travis. Eddie did. Thirty years of waving a flashlight at trains.”
Travis’s face went from tan to gray in about two seconds. Eddie stood up and said, “Mom, please. Not today. That was between me and him.” But Ida shook her head. “It stopped being between you two when he stood up at your daughter’s wedding and laughed at the job that paid for his roof.” She pulled out one last thing from the envelope: a thank-you card from the school district, signed by twenty-three children, for the night Eddie stood on that frozen crossing.
The DJ had turned off the music. The bride, our daughter Lacey, came over and stood beside her father, slipping her arm through his. Travis took off his sunglasses for the first time all evening. His eyes were red. “I was going to pay you back,” he said, so quietly the microphone barely caught it. “I know,” Eddie said. “That’s why I never asked.”
Nobody laughed after that. Travis walked over to his brother, and for a moment I thought he would say something smart, because that’s all he’s ever done. Instead, he put both arms around Eddie and held on like a man who had finally realized how close he came to the tracks.
Ida sat back down and folded her napkin exactly the way she had before. “Now,” she said to me, “somebody please start the music. This is a wedding.” And for the rest of the night, Travis didn’t touch the microphone once. He danced with his mother, then with Lacey, and then he sat next to Eddie with a ginger ale of his own.
