Work fills the hours of Christmas break when he is not at practice at the high school or the meetinghouse hall. At various times, Rick drops by the garage to visit with him, as do others of his teammates—the bike, brought down from the barn, is a draw, much envied and admired. He lets a dozen proposed plans for New Year’s Eve flow over his broad shoulders with the remark he needs to work.
The snow finally hits on Friday, heavier in the foothills than the lowland, and keeps them busy all afternoon and into the evening. Reuben fades suddenly in the early evening and takes himself home, leaving his desk cluttered with the books he has been working on between calls.
Later, Sam sits down at the desk with a cup of tea to take a break. The books are right there in front of him. He’s been reading the ledgers since he was a kid—numbers have never been the mystery letters were. What the books say about the state of the business is no surprise; Sam sees the work orders and distributors’ bills and the totals on the cash register regularly enough even during basketball season to map the financial seismography. Winter’s always harsh, he tells himself, pushing the garage accounts aside. Always. Harsh.
Underneath is another ledger, an old and dog-eared one he’s never read though he’s seen it in the cabinet. Curious, he tips it open. It enumerates the whole history of his father’s ownership of the garage and the total family financial situation—farm rents, property taxes, caretaking income and so on. Flipping toward the current year, he ascertains Pearl’s assets—the diner, liquid assets, house and land inherited from old Joe Nevers and Joe’s sister, her grandmother, Gussie—are not recorded, which is what he expects. Considering both his father and Pearl got nuked in their respective divorces, it’s not surprising they were extremely reluctant to mingle their finances. Pearl gave up the two vehicles she owned at the time of the marriage as lightly as dusting flour from her hands, with the remark they were a needless expense, and it was she who announced her willingness to sell her property to buy a furnace, so he guesses it is his father’s pride that continues to keep the accounts separated. Ignoring the farm, which given the current real estate market could only be sold at a serious loss, if at all, and without Pearl’s assets, Reuben teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Historically, nothing new—he’s never really recovered financially from the divorce.
Sam closes the ledger and pushes it away. A scrap of paper drifts toward the floor and he catches and smoothes it against the satiny oak of the old desk. It is his father’s running summary, the bottom line slashed so boldly it’s almost ripped through the paper. The quarterly tax demand, the distributors’ take, the mortgage payment comes to a sum that makes Sam queasy. He doesn’t see how they can make it. He grabs both ledgers back and picks through them again, looking for the way his father’s going to get through the next quarter.
Suddenly Sam is struck by the realization there is no accounting for the bike. Which means it must be in Pearl’s books. It must have come out of her money, costing his father only another blow to his pride. Or else Reuben borrowed the money from her and keeps, somewhere, a secret accounting of how much he owes her.
He can’t stop thinking about it. He’s been colossally immature and self-centered, nothing but basketball and his dick on his mind. Sweating a new pair of high-tops and the cost of Christmas presents while his father’s been worrying about losing his life’s work unless he can bend to accept his wife’s help. He well knows how his father’s mind works; it isn’t just the humiliation of being financially dependent on a woman and after having been out on his own since he was Sam’s age but the suspicion her hard-earned money would be following bad, ruining her too. No wonder Reuben was upset about her wanting to sell some of her land to buy a new furnace; he must have heard the click of the first domino falling. Reuben believes with a feudal fervor that land is capital—once sold, almost impossible to recover, and the too-liquid money goes, and then you’ve no land and no cash either.
On Saturday, Sam finds an excuse to go to the farmhouse to reassure himself it hasn’t got a for-sale sign on it yet. Wandering through the yard with his fingertips in his pockets, face burning with the wind that embitters this point on the Ridge most of the winter, he finds his old hoop, the one they’d taken down after the fire and never got back up again. In the barn something else catches his eye: a bundle of electrical cable. The power company had used the fire as an excuse to run new line into the farmhouse, replacing the cable that had been there for four decades. Naturally he and Reuben had picked up the discard; never know when something like that could be used, if only to secure a bumper or a door temporarily.
Seized with a sudden vision, Sam welcomes the distraction. He takes both hoop and cable. A rusty little space heater from the farmhouse—if his father misses it, he will admit to tripping over it and then throwing the damaged thing out in embarrassment. He stops at the hardware store and charges some other items to Reuben’s account. And blushing furiously, with a tap on Reuben’s shoulder to get his
