Roger’s goodbye after forty-one years was a prepaid card worth $2,150, and the day I used it, nine days ahead of my surgery, the teller asked for my MAIDEN NAME.
His three duffels went to the truck while I was buying groceries. The woman in his passenger seat was forty-two.
The card sat on the counter, propped against my African violet.
“Should be twenty-one fifty on it,” he said to the doormat.
His shirts and his mother’s Thanksgivings for forty-one years, and it weighed less than a stamp.
I tucked it behind the Kwik Trip receipts in my checkbook and left it there to crack.
It came close.
This month a surgeon in Mankato swung his screen around and circled a spot on my aorta.
“WEEKS, Ms. Brekke,” he said. “This isn’t one we watch.”
My son Doug did my side of the divorce papers and quit picking up once they were filed.
My list of people to call was EMPTY, and I wasn’t starting one at sixty-seven.
I wore my church coat on the number 6, past a boy selling sweet corn in the rain.
I set the card flat on the counter when the teller called me up.
“The WHOLE balance,” I said.
She smiled, typed, and stopped. Her eyes went from the card to my license to her monitor.
Kristi asked what my name was before I married, and my insides went to water.
The card was from my ex-husband, I told her. From the day he moved out.
Her mouth went thin. “I’ll grab Mitch,” she said. “Somebody should’ve reached you on this.”
I hung onto the counter with both hands, sure I was being made a fool of in my good coat.
A heavyset man walked out of an office in back, holding a brown envelope wound in packing tape.
Roger’s backward-leaning printing ran across it.
Marilyn Schaaf.
The name I had in 1979, when he borrowed his brother’s car to take me anywhere.
“Ms. Brekke,” Mitch said, and laid it on the counter facing me. “Our instructions were to keep this in the vault till you used that card yourself.”
He let that sit.
“SIX YEARS,” he said. “Six years it’s waited on you.”
The Envelope on Mitch’s Desk
Mitch walked me back to a little office off the lobby with a bowl of butterscotch on the desk and a window onto the drive-through.
My fingers couldn’t get under the tape. He took the envelope from me, slit it with a letter opener and slid it back.
The envelope held a sheet of Roger’s notepaper, folded in thirds, and two photocopies held together with a paper clip.
The copies were the front and the back of a cashier’s check. Pay to the order of Marilyn R. Brekke. Fifty-eight thousand four hundred dollars and no cents. The title company that closed on our house on Pfau had cut it the second week of June, six years ago.
Roger’s note was four lines in that printing of his that leans backward, like the words are trying to get away from the pen.
Mare. Nancy at the title office mailed me copies of both our checks when I asked for my records. Turn yours over. I should have come by and said it, and I couldn’t get it out. Card’s in your name with your old name for the password, so it’s you that opens this and nobody else. My number hasn’t changed. R.
Mitch cleared his throat. He said the balance was twenty-one hundred and fifty dollars, the same as the day the account opened, and asked if I still wanted it in cash.
I’d had $38 in checking that morning. The surgeon’s appointment card was on my fridge under a magnet shaped like a strawberry.
I said cash was fine.
He counted it onto the desk in hundreds and twenties, put it in a bank envelope and handed it across. It went in my purse without my looking at it.
Then I turned the photocopy over.
The back of a check has that box of little lines where you endorse it. Somebody had. Marilyn R. Brekke, in blue ink, neat as a church bulletin, and under it for deposit only and an account number I had never seen.
My signature says Marilyn Brekke. It has said that on every permission slip and every Hy-Vee timecard and every birthday card I ever mailed.
The R is for Ruth, after my mother. It lives on my birth certificate and my Social Security card and nowhere else.
Mitch asked if I wanted a glass of water. I shook my head and kept looking at that line of blue ink.
Sixty-seven years, and I have never once signed my name with the R.
The Legal Pad on Pfau
The kitchen on Pfau was small enough that I could stand at the stove and reach the sink without moving my feet. I stood there forty-one years.
Roger left in March. He took the duffels and the good cooler and his mother’s mantel clock, and he left the card by my violet.
I didn’t tell Doug about the card. I still don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want him to see how small it was.
The next week Doug came by after his shift at the plant, still in his work boots, carrying a yellow legal pad and a box of green hanging folders.
“Let me take this off your plate,” he said.
He sat at the table where he used to do his spelling words, uncapped a pen and wrote across the top of the first page: Marilyn R. Brekke.
He put the R on everything after that. The lawyer’s intake form. The realtor’s listing sheet. A letter to the gas company about taking Roger’s name off the bill.
The only other place that had ever used my middle initial was the Social Security office.
“I don’t use the R,” I said.
“The forms like it,” he said, and kept writing.
While I made coffee he labeled the folders in black marker. Brekke House. Brekke Lawyer. Brekke Bank.
His capital B still looked like a 13. It had since third grade. He would draw the stick, and then the two bumps would come loose from it and drift off to the right, and I’d sit beside him at that same table with a red Bic and join them back on.
Some nights we spent twenty minutes on that one letter.
I still have the pen. It moved with me to the apartment in the junk drawer, with the twist ties and the birthday candles, which tells you what kind of packer I am.
Stacy brought casseroles those first weeks and kept the kids in the car so they wouldn’t see their grandmother in her robe.
Doug handled the realtor. Doug talked to the lawyer. When the closing came up in June, he said I didn’t need to sit in a room with his father and that woman.
“I’ll bring you whatever needs signing,” he said. “You’ve been through enough.”
He came one morning with a stack of paper that had yellow plastic flags sticking out the side. Sign here. Initial here. Date here.
I didn’t read any of it. I’d been married since I was a girl, and Roger always did the papers, and I didn’t want my son sitting across from me watching me not understand a closing statement.
He’d brought his own pen. I’d made a tuna hotdish, and he took the rest of it home.
I signed where the flags were, and I thanked him for it.
$9,213.40
A couple weeks after the closing, Doug came by the apartment with a single typed sheet off his home printer.
Across the top it said Net to Marilyn. Below it ran a column. The mortgage payoff. The home equity line. The realtor. The lawyer. Title fees. Half of this and half of that.
The bottom line said $9,213.40.
Doug had written in the corner, in pen, Sign both, keep the top one. D.
I knew about the home equity line. We took it out the winter Roger’s back went and the mill kept him off most of a year. A small number made a kind of sense to me.
I signed both. The top one went in the folder marked Brekke House, the way he said.
The money was in my checking by the end of that week.
I’d rented two rooms over the laundromat on Front, where the floor stays warm from the dryers all winter and my violet did better than it ever had on Pfau.
I made that nine thousand last six years, with my Social Security and a bus pass and more oatmeal than I care to talk about.
That July, Doug bought a pontoon.
He called me from the lake to tell me. The plant had paid out bonuses, he said, and Stacy had been after him about a boat since the kids were born.
Stacy mailed me a picture of the four of them on it, the kids in orange life jackets and Doug at the wheel in sunglasses. I put it on my fridge. I looked at it every morning while the oatmeal cooked.
The divorce was final by the end of that summer. I called Doug and asked if he could find me a copy of the closing papers, for my taxes.
“I’ll dig it up,” he said.
That was the last time he answered.
From then on I got a text on my birthday. Stacy sent a card every December with the kids’ school pictures in it, signed Love, the Brekkes, in her round handwriting.
A mother doesn’t push a son who’s got a lot on him. I didn’t push.
Then the surgeon. Then his scheduler, a nice girl on the phone, asking who would be driving me home afterward and staying with me the first few days.
I told her I’d call her back with a name.
Roger’s Phone Number
I rode the number 6 home with the bank envelope in my purse and the photocopies buttoned inside my coat.
Roger’s number was still in my phone under R. I never figured out how to delete anybody, and I didn’t want him to be the one I learned on.
I sat on the edge of my bed. Downstairs somebody had sneakers in a dryer, going around and around like a slow drum.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Mare,” he said.
A television was going behind him, and a woman’s voice asked who it was. He didn’t answer her.
“I used your card,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Good. I figured you’d have to one of these days.”
“How long have you known?”
He breathed into the phone a while. “The fall after. Nancy mailed me the copies, yours in with mine. I turned it over. That R. I never once saw you use it.”
“And you sat on it.”
“I put it where you’d get it and nobody else would.”
“I got twenty-one fifty at the door, Roger.”
“I know what you got,” he said. “I had a whole speech worked out in the truck that day, and then you came up the steps with the groceries.”
“The account number on the back,” I said. “Do you know it?”
“I don’t know it, Mare.”
“Roger.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I didn’t go looking. If I found out, I’d have had to do something, and it wasn’t mine to do.”
I didn’t say anything. The woman asked again who it was.
“Six years,” I said.
“Would you have believed me over him?” he said.
The Folder Marked Brekke House
I didn’t sleep much. The dryers quit around eleven and started up again at six.
When it got light I pulled the box out of my closet. The green folders were in it the way Doug had packed them, the tabs still in his black marker.
I laid the Brekke House folder on my kitchen table with the tab toward me. Next to it I put the photocopy of the back of the check, and next to that the Net to Marilyn sheet.
Then I put my reading glasses on and bent close.
On the tab, the B in Brekke had its stick, and its two bumps drifting off to the right without touching it.
On the check, the B in Brekke had its stick, and its two bumps drifting off to the right without touching it.
Ahead of the B sat the R, with a little period after it, the way you’d fill out a form.
I got up and opened the junk drawer and dug the red Bic out from under the twist ties. It still wrote.
I did what I used to do at the table on Pfau. I drew one short red line on the tab, joining the bumps back to the stick.
Then I did it on the photocopy, in the same place, with the same line.
I sat a while with the pen in my hand. The violet on the windowsill needed water, and I didn’t get up to give it any.
On the back of Roger’s envelope I wrote 58,400.00. Below it I wrote 9,213.40 and drew the line.
I did the borrowing the way the nuns taught me, and then I did it over, because my hand was shaking and I didn’t trust the first one.
It came out the same both times.
$49,186.60.
Doug’s Kitchen in North Mankato
The cab to North Mankato was $31. It was the first of Roger’s money I spent.
Doug’s split-level sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. The pontoon was up on its trailer beside the garage, under a blue tarp gone the color of dishwater.
Stacy opened the door with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“Marilyn?” she said. “Did something happen?”
Tyler was at the kitchen table with his math homework. Brooke was on the floor with a coloring book, doing a horse in purple. They looked up at me like I was somebody they knew from church.
“Downstairs, you two,” Stacy said.
Doug came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a shop rag.
“Didn’t know you were coming,” he said.
I sat down at his table without taking off my coat. I took the photocopies out and laid them face down. Then I turned them over, the front and then the back, and set the Net to Marilyn sheet beside them, and the green folder beside that with the tab facing him.
I didn’t say anything.
He looked for a long time. The rag stopped moving.
“Where’d you get this,” he said.
He didn’t wait for me. “The old man. Of course. Six years he doesn’t pick up a phone for you, and now he’s mailing you paperwork.”
He threw the rag on the counter.
“I asked you,” he said. “I stood in your kitchen and asked if you wanted to go through it. And you said just show you where.”
Stacy had turned around from the sink.
“Somebody had to handle it,” he said. “That spring you couldn’t pick out a toaster. Were you going to put fifty-eight grand in a coffee can? Give it to the church?”
He pulled a chair out and didn’t sit in it.
“We were underwater,” he said. “Daycare for two kids. The truck. Stacy’s hours got cut. I was always going to put it back.”
“The money was coming to us anyway,” he said. “Eventually. I took it early, so it’d do some good while you were around to see it.”
“The boat was a bonus, you told me,” Stacy said.
“Stace. Drop it.”
“The plant paid out, you said.”
“I said drop it.”
He turned back to me and put both hands flat on the table, the way I’d had mine on the bank counter.
“Goddamn it, it’s gone,” he said. “Half of it’s in that boat, and the rest is this kitchen and Tyler’s braces. I don’t have it. Do you want to call somebody on your own son? Call, then. See who drives you to your surgery.”
He was thirty-nine years old, and he still pushed his lower lip up when he was scared, the way he did the morning he started kindergarten.
“Get your legal pad,” I said.
“My what?”
“The yellow one.”
Stacy opened the drawer by the phone, took out the pad and set it in front of him with a pen on top.
He reached for his phone instead. “I can type something up and email it.”
“Longhand,” I said. “The way you make your B.”
He looked at me for a second. Then he picked up the pen.
“Write that you owe Marilyn Brekke forty-nine thousand one hundred eighty-six dollars and sixty cents,” I said. “Five hundred a month, into the account your father opened for me.”
“He opened you an account?”
I didn’t answer that.
He wrote. He stopped at my name with the pen in the air.
“R?” he said.
“Drop the R.”
He wrote the rest, and the date, and signed it Doug Brekke. The B came out with its bumps floating off to the right.
“And the morning of my surgery,” I said. “Five-thirty. Drive me there, and sit till they tell you I’m done.”
“Fine,” he said. He didn’t look up. “Fine.”
I tore the page off, folded it in thirds and put it inside my coat with the photocopies. The green folder I left on his table.
“Would you call me a cab, Stacy,” I said.
5:30 by the Laundromat Door
Doug’s truck was at the curb by the laundromat at 5:25, engine running, the sky just going gray over the grain elevator.
He came up and carried my bag down. He didn’t say good morning. I didn’t either.
We drove across the river with the radio on the farm report, corn and beans and hogs, and neither of us touched the dial.
Stopped at a red light, he took an envelope off the dash and held it out without looking at me. The envelope held a check for $500, made out to the account at Mitch’s bank, my name spelled the way I spell it.
I put it in my purse with my checkbook. Roger’s card was still in the back of it, behind the Kwik Trip receipts, empty now.
“The kids have a lot going on this fall,” he said at the next light. “Stacy thinks it’s better if they don’t come by for a while.”
I said all right.
I looked out at the river the rest of the way. Brooke had been coloring that horse when Stacy sent her downstairs. I never saw how she finished it.
The woman at the admitting desk typed my name in and asked who my emergency contact was.
I gave her Doug’s name and his cell number from memory. Across the waiting room he looked up from his phone when he heard it.
The pre-op nurse had reading glasses on a beaded chain. She wrapped the cuff around my arm and looked out through the gap in the curtain.
“That your son out there?” she said. “That young man’s walked the hallway about fifteen times.”
“My ride,” I said.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody whose kids have been handling their paperwork.
For more stories about life’s unexpected twists, you might enjoy reading about His Bride Still Had Rice in Her Hair When He Handed Me the Pages or the emotional tale of how Heather drove her mother to our bakery the week we buried her brother. And for another dose of drama, check out when Denise had the coat room tape cued on her office computer before I parked.
