Cody Harlan walked me into a stairwell at the Kearney hospital with my sister still under and said Jodie had made him swear on the babies I would NEVER see what was in his wallet unless she didn’t wake up.
I have known that man since we were six.
I thought I’d seen all of him.
Jodie is two years younger and has Down syndrome. In Gibbon that meant the bus seat beside her stayed empty.
Mornings and afternoons both.
Cody lived two houses down. He took that seat in second grade.
He never made a speech about it. He never told anybody off.
He sat there until he graduated.
I watched him the whole time and never REALLY understood it.
He wasn’t sweet on her. Half the days they didn’t talk.
The bus smelled like wet mittens all winter.
When she was ten he told her he’d take her to homecoming someday.
“He promised me,” she said, like that settled it.
Jodie was the only one who believed him.
Her senior year he drove home from Kansas harvest and took her.
The whole town had Cody and me married off by then.
Last summer he knelt in my parents’ kitchen and asked Jodie.
I bawled. She kept patting my arm.
“What’s wrong with you, Mandy?” she said.
She stood on a folding chair at the Legion hall in her tiara and told everybody TWO babies were coming.
Mom set her fork down and didn’t pick it back up.
The pregnancy was hard from the start.
Thirty-two weeks in, the ambulance took her up the interstate to Kearney.
The doctor came out once and looked at his shoes.
Mom sat on her phone all night and never ONCE said Jodie’s name.
My father slept sitting up.
Cody stood at the window, and not one of us said a word until the sky went gray.
Come six o’clock there were THIRTY-EIGHT people in that waiting room.
I didn’t know one of them.
Old women in church coats. A girl still in her grocery apron.
They brought a crockpot. A quilt. Two car seats still in the boxes.
I never found a card on any of it.
I asked the girl who called her.
“We heard,” she said. That was all.
Then Cody took my wrist and walked me out.
His face had gone the color of the cinderblock.
“Jodie made me promise something before they put her under,” he said.
“I show you one thing. And only if she doesn’t wake up.”
He had both my hands. His were shaking worse than mine.
“I can’t wait on it, Mandy,” he said. “You need to know the real reason I married her.”
My stomach went right through the floor.
“Cody, don’t you say that to me,” I said.
My head went straight to the worst.
Grandpa’s eighty acres on the Platte? The money from Jodie’s paychecks?
Or was it me all along, and she was the closest he could get?
He watched all of it cross my face.
“Worse than that,” he said. “Sit down on the step.”
He got his wallet out.
Tucked behind his license was a check folded in quarters, gone soft as a dish rag.
He held it out.
“Read it here,” he said. “RIGHT NOW, while she’s still in there.”
I unfolded it on my knee.
The name on the pay-to line was Cody’s.
The handwriting was MY MOTHER’S.
Check Number 1047
Mom’s check was from the bank in Gibbon, the brick one across the street from the elevator.
Number 1047, dated the nineteenth of last August.
Pay to the order of Cody Harlan. Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars, written out in words and then again in numbers, the way she taught Jodie and me to do it at the kitchen counter.
On the memo line she’d written “so she’s settled.”
Pamela J. Pruitt on the signature line, with the big loop on the P she puts on birthday cards.
Printed up in the corner, over the old address on Front Street, were two names.
Hers. And under hers, Jodie’s.
The sound came out of me before I knew it was mine. It went up two flights of that stairwell and came back down.
Cody sat on the step below me and put his hand flat between my shoulders and left it there.
“I never took it to the bank,” he said. “I want that said first.”
A page from a spiral notebook was folded up inside the check, the torn fringe still on one edge.
I knew that too. Jodie prints in capitals and presses so hard the words come through the back of the paper.
MANDY. MOM PAID CODY TO TAKE ME. HE SAID NO. I MARRIED HIM ANYWAY BECAUSE HE SAT WITH ME. KEEP THIS. DONT LET HER HAVE MY BABIES.
Under that, her name, and the lopsided heart she draws on everything.
“When did Mom give you this?” I said.
“She drove out to the scale house on the nineteenth,” Cody said. “Harvest hadn’t started. I was out there by myself.”
“And you took it.”
“She stuck it in my shirt pocket and got back in the Buick. She was gone before I got it out.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I’d had the ring in my glove box since the fourth, Mandy. Your mom didn’t know that. Jodie was the only one who knew that.”
“And Jodie wrote this when?”
“July. Right after the wedding. She sat at our kitchen table and wrote it and made me fold it in with the check.”
“And she didn’t want me to have it unless she died.”
He looked down at the concrete for a while.
“She said you’d go to war with your mom over it, and she’d be the reason,” he said. “She said as long as she was here, she could handle your mom herself.”
“And if she wasn’t?”
“Then it was yours.”
I turned the check over. The back was clean, not a signature on it, not a stamp.
Thirteen months that check had been riding behind his license.
Down below us somebody opened the waiting room door, and I heard the crockpot lid rattle and a woman laugh at something and then stop.
“That account,” I said. “The one with her name on it.”
“Where her paychecks go,” Cody said. “Nine years of them.”
I held the check up to the wired glass and read my sister’s name again.
How much of her nine years was still in there?
The Green Ledger in the Rolltop
Jodie got hired at the grocery in Gibbon the spring she turned twenty-two.
Lorraine Kopecky ran the store then and still does. She put Jodie on bagging and carryout and never once asked Mom whether Jodie could handle it.
On paydays Mom drove her in and waited out front in the Buick with the engine running.
Jodie came out with a white envelope with her name typed on it.
At home she signed the back of the check at the kitchen counter, tongue in the corner of her mouth, and slid it across to Mom.
Mom carried it to the rolltop desk in the front room.
The rolltop had been Grandma’s. It had a little tray for pencils and a drawer on the left side that locked.
In that drawer was a green ledger with a cloth cover worn shiny at the corners.
Mom wrote the date and the amount in it in her slanted hand, locked the drawer, and dropped the key on her ring next to the Buick key.
“Where does it go?” Jodie asked her once. I was home for the weekend, standing right there by the fridge.
“Where it’s safe,” Mom said. “For your house someday.”
“My house someday,” Jodie said. She liked that one. She said it for weeks.
I knew where the spare desk key was. I’d found it when I was twelve, hunting for a stamp, taped up under the pencil tray. I never said a word about it.
Jodie kept her own book.
It was a spiral notebook, the cheap kind from the school aisle, and it lived in her apron pocket.
In it were her people.
The women whose groceries she carried out, and a few of the men. Their names, their cars, what they wanted on top.
MRS. BEHRENS. EGGS ON TOP. BLUE PONTIAC.
MR. SUCHY. PAPER NOT PLASTIC.
She got their birthdays out of them in the parking lot and called every one of them on the day. When it snowed hard she called the old ones to ask if they needed milk.
I thought it was sweet. I never thought past sweet.
When I was twenty-six and had my own place in Kearney, I asked Mom if Jodie could come live with me.
Mom was at the sink. She didn’t turn around.
“You’ve got your own life to think about,” she said. “Somebody’s going to have to take her someday, and it isn’t going to be you.”
“I’m asking to,” I said.
“I’ll talk to her.”
A week later Mom called and said Jodie wanted to stay home with them.
I asked again the next year. And once more, the year I turned thirty. I got the same answer both times, and it came from Mom, never from Jodie.
The fall I was twenty-seven my old Chevy threw a rod, and Mom co-signed for the Impala.
“Your credit’s thin,” she said. “We’ll put it in my name till it’s paid off.”
My father, Wayne, drove us to the dealership in Hastings and waited out in the truck.
I made every payment for six years. The last one went in this May.
The title went in the rolltop, in the drawer with the green book.
The Waiting Room After Seven
The surgeon came out at twenty to eight, in the same shoes.
Jodie had made it through. She’d lost a lot of blood, he said, and they would keep her asleep in the ICU until afternoon.
The babies were upstairs in the NICU, a boy and a girl. Hank and Ruth. Jodie had picked those in July and written them in her notebook in capitals.
Cody went up to see them. He came back down and sat by the window and didn’t say anything for a long while.
The thirty-eight people stayed. A few left for work, and others came in behind them with more coffee.
Lorraine Kopecky was one of them. She had her store vest on under a church coat.
I watched Mom cross the room and sit down beside her.
I was at the coffee machine. I heard every word.
“Well, we all know why he married her,” Mom said. “That boy never had two nickels to rub together.”
Lorraine looked at her a long time and didn’t answer.
Mom had been saying that for a year. After church, at the co-op counter, to the woman who does her hair. I’d heard it and let it go by.
Then she came over to me with her purse on her arm.
“Run down to Gibbon and get Jodie’s bag,” she said. “It’s on her bed. The key’s under the geranium.”
Jodie had spent the last three weeks on bed rest at Mom’s. Mom had insisted, because Cody was working twelve-hour shifts at the scale.
“And at seven tonight we’ll all sit down in the family room upstairs and figure out where she goes when she’s out of here,” Mom said. “Her and the babies.”
“She goes home with Cody,” I said.
Mom patted my arm the way Jodie does. It wasn’t the same.
“Seven,” she said.
I drove the interstate with her check in my coat pocket. Cody had folded it back along its creases and put it in my hand in the stairwell.
The house on Front Street smelled like lemon cleaner.
Jodie’s bag was packed on her bed, the way it had been since August. Her spiral notebook was stuffed in the side pocket.
I picked up the bag. Then I went into the front room.
The spare key was still taped under the pencil tray. Twenty-one years, and nobody had moved it.
The drawer opened on the first try.
The green ledger was on top. Under it was the title to my Impala. Under that was a big envelope from a title company in Mesa, Arizona, with a letter clipped to the front.
I opened the ledger to the back.
Nine years of paydays in Mom’s slanted hand. Two a month, never a gap.
Then, starting last March, lines going the other way. Beside each one, the same word. Mesa.
Halfway down the last page was 1047, C. Harlan, 18,400. After it, in pencil, not cashed.
A yellow sticky note was pressed down next to it in Mom’s writing.
Void after the babies, nobody will ask.
The letter on the Mesa envelope had a closing date. Next Friday. Pamela and Wayne Pruitt.
At the bottom of the last page, circled twice, was the balance.
$311.40.
I put the ledger in Jodie’s bag on top of her nightgown and locked the drawer behind me.
Nine years of carrying other people’s groceries out to their cars.
Three hundred eleven dollars and forty cents.
Jodie’s Spiral Notebook
They let Jodie wake up a little after four.
Cody had been in with her an hour when he came out and said she was asking for me.
Her room looked out on the parking lot and the highway, where the grain trucks were already running.
She was so pale her freckles looked drawn on.
I set her bag on the chair by the bed.
Her voice was mostly gone. “Did he show you?”
“He showed me.”
“You mad at me?”
“Jo. I’m mad at somebody. It isn’t you.”
She moved her fingers on the blanket. “My book.”
I got the notebook out of the side pocket and left the green one where it was.
She couldn’t hold it up, so I held it and she turned the pages with one finger.
Her people. MRS. BEHRENS. MR. SUCHY. A page of baby names with HANK and RUTH circled so hard the pen went through.
Then a page with IF I GO TO KEARNEY across the top.
Under it she’d written LORRAINE CALL MY PEOPLE, and below that a list of names and phone numbers, and a date from August.
“You did that,” I said.
“I told Lorraine,” she said. “In case.”
She turned two more pages and stopped.
That page said MANDY at the top.
Under it were dates. Five of them, going back eight years. Beside each one, in capitals, what she had asked and what she had been told.
ASKED MOM CAN I LIVE WITH MANDY. MOM SAID MANDY SAID NO.
ASKED AGAIN. MOM SAID MANDY HAS HER OWN LIFE.
ASKED MOM AGAIN. MOM SAID DONT ASK MANDY, IT WILL UPSET HER.
The last two dates had no words next to them at all. Only a line drawn through.
I read down the page with my thumb on the edge of it.
Three of those dates I knew. They were the years I’d stood in Mom’s kitchen talking to her back at the sink.
“I asked her, Jo,” I said. “I asked her three times.”
Jodie looked at me for a while without blinking much.
“She said you said no,” she said.
“I never said no.”
She took the page between two fingers and pulled until it tore out along the wire.
She put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it with hers.
“Take it to seven o’clock,” she said.
The Family Room Off the NICU
The family room was on the third floor, next to the nursery doors. A blue vinyl couch, two chairs, a box of tissues, and a TV up in the corner with the sound off.
Mom had the couch. My father had the chair by the window. Cody stood by the door in the same work coat he’d had on for two days.
I sat in the other chair with Jodie’s bag on my lap.
Mom had a yellow pad on her knee with a list on it.
“All right,” she said. “Here’s how this goes.”
“Jodie comes home to Gibbon with the babies. Her old room. Wayne’s getting the crib up out of the basement tomorrow, and we’ll borrow another one from the Sedlaceks.”
“Cody, you’re at that scale twelve hours a day through harvest. You can’t do nights with two preemies and a wife who can’t get out of bed.”
“She’s my wife,” Cody said.
“And we all know how that came about,” Mom said.
My father looked at the carpet.
“I’ll keep handling her checks like always,” Mom said. “Lorraine will hold her job. I’ll make sure of it.”
She looked at me.
“Mandy, you can help on weekends. When you can get away.”
I unzipped Jodie’s bag.
I put the green ledger on the coffee table, open to the last page. The check went down flat beside it. Jodie’s torn page went on top of the check.
I didn’t say anything.
Mom looked at the ledger a long time.
“You went in my desk,” she said. “You went into my house and into my desk with your sister on the table.”
“That money is room and board, Amanda. Thirty-one years. Thirty-one years I drove that girl to the doctor and the speech lady and the grocery and back. You were in Kearney. You had your apartment and your little job and your Friday nights. I had her.”
“She was never going to make it on her own. Somebody had to see she was settled.”
“So you’d pay a man,” Cody said.
“Half the men in this county would have cashed it and been glad,” Mom said. “You were supposed to cash it and keep your mouth shut.”
My father had picked up the ledger. He was reading the last page with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, holding it close to his face.
“Pam,” he said. “You told me Mesa was your mother’s CDs.”
“I told you what you needed to know, Wayne.”
“Her name’s printed at the top.”
“My name is printed first.”
He set the book down on his knee and didn’t say anything else.
Mom turned back to me. Her voice went low and even, the way it used to when we were little and had broken something.
“You were never going to take her. You’d have said yes and been done inside a month. I saved you from that. I saved all of you from that.”
“I asked you three times,” I said.
She looked at Jodie’s page and not at me.
“Walk out of here with that book and you’re done with this family,” she said. “And that Impala is in my name. Leave the keys on the table.”
I got my keys out of my coat. I worked the car key off the ring, and it took a while, because my hands weren’t good.
I set it on top of the ledger.
My father stood up. He picked up the check and Jodie’s page and handed both of them to me. Then he put the green book under his arm and went out into the hall with his phone.
I heard him through the door.
“It’s Wayne Pruitt,” he said. “I need to talk to you about next Friday.”
An Account in Jodie’s Name
The twins came home five weeks later.
Cody and Jodie rent a farmhouse two miles south of Gibbon with a porch that leans toward the road. I sleep in their spare room on an air mattress, with Ruth’s crib pushed up against the wall.
I took unpaid leave from the register at the farm supply in Kearney. I don’t know yet if they’ll hold the job. I ride along with Cody when I need to be somewhere.
Mom hasn’t called. I didn’t think she would.
My father drove out once, on a weekday morning. He stood on the porch with his cap in his hands and held Hank for twenty minutes and didn’t say much.
“The Mesa thing’s off,” he said when he gave Hank back. “What comes back from it is hers.”
He didn’t come in.
The first week Jodie was cleared to ride, Cody drove the three of us and both babies to a bank in Kearney, not the one in Gibbon.
Jodie wore her store vest. She said it made her look like somebody with a job, which she is.
She sat across the desk from a young man in a tie and spelled her own name out for him, and her address, and Cody’s.
She signed the card with her tongue in the corner of her mouth.
I sat next to her with Ruth in one of the car seats from the waiting room. The tag was still hanging off the handle. We never found out who brought them.
Jodie asked the young man for paper checks.
“Hardly anybody asks for those anymore,” he said.
“I do,” Jodie said.
That evening she got her spiral notebook out at the kitchen table.
I’d carried Mom’s check in my coat pocket for five weeks. I gave it to her.
She taped it to a clean page, all four edges, and wrote PROOF across the top, pressing so hard it came through the back.
Then she turned back to the page that said IF I GO TO KEARNEY.
“Did you count them?” she said. “My people?”
“Thirty-eight,” I said.
She ran her finger down her list, name by name, her lips moving.
“I only put thirty-six,” she said.
Somebody sat in the empty seat for somebody you love. Send this to them.
For more stories about family secrets and unexpected truths, check out Their Hot Tub Ran All Winter While Joyce’s Irises Sat In A Coffee Can, or perhaps My Mother Had Already Hemmed Curtains to Fit My Spare Room Windows and My Husband’s Sister Stopped Her Fiancé From Seeing My Folder.
