Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

a very stupid, stupid thing. This is hard for me to tell you.”

      I felt guilty for not confessing that I had snuck a look at the letter and knew all about it already. It hurt to hear her call my father stupid, while at the same time it gave me a weird little boost in the dark recesses where I felt I was in competition with him for my mother’s esteem. That made me feel even guiltier.

      She went on to explain why the Bank of Wisconsin was demanding that my father pay $108,715.87, which was more than seven times his annual income and over ten times our entire net worth. Philip Newley, the guy the bank couldn’t locate, was a friend of my dad’s boss at the Dieworks, Leon Bridette. My mother said Newley was an “entrepreneur,” saying the word like it was synonymous with “con man” or “thief.” Newley had once served on the school board, and with school lunch programs on the upswing, he decided there was easy money to be made selling lunch trays to school districts. He formed a corporation and signed a couple of contracts to supply trays. Problem was, Newley needed a bank loan to start the business. He had a bad track record with the local banks, having started businesses before that had failed.

      “So,” she continued, “he asked Leon Bridette to get someone at the Dieworks to co-sign for the loan. Do you know what that means?” She sipped the dregs of Jamie’s hot chocolate. Her eyes were clearing and she seemed to be regaining her usual starch.

      “Yes.” My mother waited while I chewed on this. I asked her, “Why would Bridette make Dad the guarantor?”

      She glanced up from the mug and shot me a suspicious look. My remark disclosed that I had listened in on the argument the night before. Worse than that, while she had said Bridette got someone to “co-sign” for the loan, I said he made Dad the “guarantor,” the word Frank T. Shriner used in his letter. I was trying to sound sophisticated, but I think she caught on that I had seen the letter.

      “Bridette told Dad that Newley’s company was going to hire the Dieworks to stamp the thousands of lunch trays he was going to sell. Newley had contacts all over the state and your dad’s company was supposedly going to make a whole lot of money.” She waved her hands up and down like she was dribbling invisible basketballs. “Big deals, big deals. But they never made one lousy tray. The loan came through and Newley took off with the money, eighty thousand, leaving David holding the bag.” Her jaw slid into an underbite and her lip curled. “Him and some other patsy.”

      “Why did Dad go along with it?” My father’s title was Manager of Product Design, which sounds distinguished but at a low-tech, mid-sized company like Falls Dieworks was a modest job. He was not one of the big shots, not by a long shot.

      “You’ll have to ask him that.” She put the mug down and began clicking her fingernails. “Some baloney about it being a test of loyalty to the company. He and the other patsy were in line for the same promotion, and your dad would lose out if the other guy went along and he didn’t.” Click, click, click. “David says he would have looked like a milquetoast if he didn’t do it. If you ask me, he did it because he’s a milquetoast.” Click, click. “But,” she sneered, “I don’t understand how these things work.” Click.

      Anger and contempt wafted in the air around her, souring the smell of the hot chocolate. I couldn’t blame her. She had good reason to be angry and contemptuous. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that she used anger and contempt as anesthetic, so she wouldn’t feel the fear.

      I felt the fear, though, in my chest and neck, hard and cold. “Will this other guy pay the loan?”

      “David says no. He’s like us, no money.” She looked off to the side and seemed absent for a moment. “Years and years. No money.”

      “What happens if we can’t pay the loan?”

      She got up and walked to the sink, rinsed out the mug, drenched the dishcloth, wrung it out. I thought she wasn’t going to answer my question. Then she leaned on the counter, her face pale and furrowed.

      “I don’t know, Jonathan. We might lose the house. We might lose everything. I may have to get a job. You’ll have a lot more responsibility around here. I don’t know if David and I will stay together. I just don’t know.”

      I looked out the window. The sun was melting the snow fast and the gutters dripped as if it were pouring rain. Elevation to adulthood suddenly didn’t seem so peachy.

      “And Jonathan,” she added. “Don’t tell Jamie about any of this. He’s a lot more fragile than you.”

      Jamie? Fragile? Strong, stubborn, obtuse Jamie? I thought of him as about as fragile as a block of wood.

      “Promise me, Jonathan. Promise me you won’t tell Jamie.”

      * *

      I look at the photo my father took of Jamie and me in the backyard, coated with melting white snow, our wet faces smiling, our eyes squinting against the glaring sunlight. My high school graduation portrait, taken less than a year later, is lying on the floor at my feet. In it, my hair is shaggy and my face has the same expression as the guy with the pitchfork in American Gothic. I look like a different person.

      I kept my promise. I never told Jamie. As I lie down on the sagging, musty mattress, I wipe dust from my lips with the back of my hand, and say, “You shouldn’t have told me.”

5

      The House, Day Two

      When I wake up, sunlight is streaming through the flimsy, rattling window in the gable. I have slept the entire night uncovered, in my clothes, sharing my old bed with a half-dozen cardboard boxes. Pictures are scattered over the bed and on the floor. The envelope with the negatives of the photos of my parents, my brother, and me at Lake Audrey is on the pillow next to my head. Thinking I might have prints made from the negatives, I shove the envelope in the back pocket of my jeans and head downstairs to forage for breakfast.

      There are about twenty cereal boxes in the pantry, all of them opened, none of them with the liners properly folded. Stale Wheaties, rancid corn flakes, raisin bran from the Pleistocene era. Unless I want another can of beans for breakfast, I must venture out. I have fond memories of the ham and eggs at the counter in Wischki’s Pharmacy on 7th Avenue.

      No one in the Keys keeps an ice scraper in his car, so I have to use an old spatula to clear some of the frost off my windshield. The heater in my ’91 Dodge, irrelevant in the Keys, fights a losing battle against the raw Wisconsin morning. I don’t own a winter jacket, and my teeth are chattering as I drive past rows of small Colonial homes and ’50s-era brick ranches. The trees in the yards are bare and the houses have a battened-down appearance.

      Sheboygan is colorless in November, even on a sunny day. It is a small, hard-scrabble city that achieved most of its growth in the early part of the last century making furniture, shoes, dairy products, and sausage. Sheboygan is enormously proud of its sausage. Its sole tourist attraction is the annual Bratwurst Festival. For two days in August each year, thousands of people from all over converge on Kiwanis Park to assail their arteries with grilled pig intestines stuffed with fat, batter their eardrums with excessively loud music, and pickle their brains with prodigious quantities of beer.

      Wischki’s Pharmacy is gone, a victim, I assume, of the big chain drugstores. The dingy brick building on the corner now houses a nameless tavern with a neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign in the window. Will it and the others like it be driven out someday by giant chain taverns?

      Wal-bar.

      Down the block is a clean, modern storefront with a new sign: “Photo-Phast – Prints in 1 hour.” I give the Lake Audrey negatives to a very young, pretty Asian woman with straight black hair, rimless glasses, and a somber demeanor. Behind her, several young black-haired, white-coated techs are diligently developing and earnestly enlarging. I don’t remember there being any Chinese-Americans in Sheboygan thirty years ago, but there appear to be quite a few of them now, at least at Photo-Phast.

      I manage to wolf down a couple of dry pancakes at McDonald’s, together with coffee in a Styrofoam cup covered with grave warnings about the coffee’s