Kevin came by in December. He sat in the living room bouncing his knee, talking about the roads and the weather and a buck he had almost hit on the highway. After twenty minutes of this, he asked Raymond for twelve thousand dollars. The paint booth at the shop was failing. He would pay it back by spring. Raymond wrote the check because that was what Eileen would have done. Kevin took it, folded it into his shirt pocket, and left without finishing his coffee.
Nora called every Sunday at six. She asked about the garden, about his meals, about whether he had been to church. She told him about Lily’s spelling bee and Sam’s new habit of naming every animal he saw. She never mentioned the will. She never asked about property or grain contracts. She asked if he was lonely, and when Raymond said he was fine, she said, “I don’t believe you, Dad, but I love you anyway.”
By the time spring arrived, Raymond had written three checks to Kevin totaling thirty-one thousand dollars. He had spoken to Marcus six times, every conversation about money. Diane had called twice, both times brief. Nora had visited nine times and called every single Sunday without exception.
Raymond started keeping a notebook, a small leather-bound book from the hardware store, the kind that cost three dollars and fit in a shirt pocket. He wrote dates, who called, what they said, what they wanted. He wrote down the things they did not say, too, the questions they did not ask. He did not plan to use the notebook for anything. It was just a way to keep track of what he was seeing because the silence between the visits was so loud, he needed proof that the pattern was real.
One evening in April while packing Eileen’s clothes into boxes for the church donation drive, Raymond found her journal. It fell from the top shelf of her closet when he reached for a hat box. He caught it before it hit the floor, sat on the edge of the bed, opened it to a random page.
Eileen had written in it for years. Some entries were about the farm, the weather, the price of seed corn. Others were about the children, their birthdays, their milestones, the small moments she wanted to remember. But one entry dated three years before her death stopped Raymond’s hands from turning the page.
A man’s children should come to see him because they want to, not because there’s something to sign. I’ve been telling Ray this for thirty years and he doesn’t hear me. He thinks providing is the same as loving. It isn’t. And the children have learned his language. They speak to him in transactions because that’s the only conversation he ever taught them.
Raymond closed the journal. He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time in the room where Eileen had died with her handwriting still warm under his fingers. Then he stood up and drove to town.