Chapter 21 of 24You Signed Them Too

Roy's last cut came through other people, and it landed at the Kroger on the north side, where the household card came back declined. Margo paid with the account that had only her name on it, the one she had opened at nineteen and no payroll had ever fed. By the time she had the bags on the kitchen table at her father's house on Sixth Street, Ada was on the telephone.

"You signed those returns too, Margaret."

"I did," Margo said. "Every year. I signed whatever he put in front of me."

"Then you'll be in it with him," Ada said. "That's what he tells me."

"He's been telling you a good deal."

Margo switched the receiver to her other ear.

"He's my son."

"I know whose son he is, Ada."

The kettle clicked off. Margaret Ackerman stood in her father's kitchen with the phone at her shoulder and the cold coming off the window over the sink, and she did not say that she had already cut the card into pieces with the kitchen shears and dropped it in the grocery sack.

"You've had a hard year," Ada said. "Nobody in this town blames a woman who's had a hard year."

"That's the kind one."

"Come Sunday. Sit at my table, the two of you, with me in the middle."

"I'll call you," Margo said, which was not yes and not no, and Ada let it stand and rang off.

Roy had not telephoned her himself in weeks. He worked through his mother now, and through whoever stood next to him at the Bluebird, which is how a thing gets done in Corley with nobody's name on it.

She drove in to the square at noon. A bucket truck sat at the corner, men stringing the courthouse cornice, the bulbs gray and unlit until Saturday. A woman she had known since Nick was small came out of the pharmacy, saw her, and crossed the square the long way toward the bank. There was nothing to say to a woman's back.

Carol had the special down on the board, meatloaf, eight forty-nine, and she set the water glass on the counter before Margo had her coat off.

"I'll have the special."

"Potatoes or slaw?"

"Potatoes."

"Good girl."

Carol wiped the counter and did not walk off.

"You hearing what's being said?"

"Suppose I'm not."

"Then I'll say it slow."

Carol waited.

"Roy was at the Eagles Tuesday night. Bought the room a round and told them you'd hired a lawyer who has you believing you own things you don't own."

"Did he."

Carol snapped the rag over her shoulder and kept going.

"Then Sunday, at the hall by the coffee urn, he told Ada's ladies you've been sick this fall and don't know it, and he's only trying to hold his family together."

"What'd they say back?"

"They said poor Roy."

Margo ate the whole plate, so the window would have nothing to look at but a woman having her lunch. She paid the eight forty-nine from the account with her name on it.

"You come in tomorrow," Carol said. "You come in every day. I'll keep Vern's booth for you."

From the truck behind the diner, with the motor off, she called Diane.

"Keep the paper," Diane said. "That's the whole of my advice this week. Put the day on the envelope and bring it to me."

"He's telling Ada he'll hand the IRS my name."

"Then he's told you the size of what he has left."

A drawer slid shut on Diane's end.

"Don't answer him. A letter from him is a fact you get to keep."

"And if they come knocking?"

"Then I take out the green card from the post office with your name on it, and the receipt under it, and you are the woman who walked in first. Nobody gets to be first but you."

"What about the town?"

"You can't file against the town."

"No," Margo said.

Nick called at four with the truck running.

"Dad's been ringing me all day."

"What did he want?"

"The same thing he wanted yesterday."

The blower of somebody's furnace ran under his voice, so he was sitting with the key on.

"That you're not well. That if this goes to a judge, Gil and the guys lose their jobs. I told him Gil's got four years and no pension."

"The parts counter wouldn't talk to me today."

"That'll pass or it won't."

"That's what you're going with?"

"It's Thursday, Nick. On Thursday I go with what's true."

Margo carried the phone to the window.

"I'm on your side. I wanted to hear myself say it."

"It's said," Margo said.

Deb came at six with a Skyline sack, because she had told Margo she would not leave her alone in this house on a Thursday.

"I brought Skyline," Deb said, and set the sack down.

"I ate at the diner."

"Eat again."

"I'll watch you."

Deb set out two plates in the kitchen she had grown up in, sat down across from Margo, and did not pick up the fork.

"Can I say the thing?"

"Say it."

"I'm starting to wonder if we pushed the bear." She turned the plate around without eating off it. "He's got the Eagles and the parish and Ada's whole pew, and a lawyer who writes letters, and we've got a table and a file."

"I've got the file."

"Don't."

Margo got up and put the kettle on, mostly so she could stand with her back to the room.

"You know what's in that file."

"I know what you've told me."

"Twenty-four years of that man's books, in my handwriting. Payroll, taxes, the loan, the customer list, every cold Saturday back to before I married him, and never a line of payroll with my name in it." She set the cup down empty. "If this town wants to know what Roy Ackerman is, it needs my filing cabinet."

Deb looked at her a while.

"I know," she said. "I just don't know yet what it costs you."

"Neither do I. That's the honest part."

"Then I'll bring the Skyline next Thursday too."

"You will."

Deb hugged her at the door and held on past the point of the hug, and then her sister's car went down Sixth Street with a taillight out, and Margo stood in the kitchen and heard how quiet the house was.

The mail came after that. A bill, and a long white envelope with Cauldwell's letterhead above the Corley return address. She slit it with the paring knife and squared the paper against the placemat.

The letter was short. The first paragraph said the unreported receipts had gone on the joint returns, that those returns carried her signature, and that she had known what was on them. The second said that if she kept pressing, Mr. Ackerman would bring the whole of it before the Internal Revenue Service, and that he did not intend to go alone.

She did not call Diane, who had told her what to do with a letter, or Deb, who would have thrown something, or Nick, who would have come over. She wrote the day and the hour on the corner of the envelope, because a note without one is a rumor, and put the letter in the front pocket of the accordion file, where the state filing and page nine of the quitclaim already lived, and closed it.

She did not cry. At three in the morning she was up, and the kitchen was cold, and the furnace her father had set in the basement ran its one slow note under a floorboard he had nailed himself. She took the fan off the windowsill and worked it across her face and her neck.

Sixth Street ran dark to the corner. Past the corner the square stood strung with gray bulbs nobody had lit yet, waiting for Saturday, and the letter in the front pocket by the door said in plain sentences that Roy Ackerman meant to take her down with him if she kept coming. Half the town already knew which Ackerman it believed. By the time they lit those lights, most of Corley would be standing under them agreeing with him.