For twelve years my father has introduced me to every rider who comes through the fairgrounds as “the girl with the helicopter,” and then he tells them I cost him $31,400 crying over a cut chin. Last Saturday he did it into a microphone, and he never noticed the man climbing off the lead bike had been on that highway.
He’s told it at the pancake breakfast, at the tractor pull, at my cousin’s wedding with the deejay still playing.
And I’ve been paying him $180 a month for it since I was eighteen.
Every month. Ten years.
My dad is the president of the county fair board. People in town call him Mr. Randall even when he’s pumping gas.
The charity run was his idea this year. Every dollar to the air ambulance service, the same one that flew me to Columbia when I was sixteen.
He thought that part was funny too.
I was on the registration table under the white tent by the grandstand, taking twenty-dollar entries and handing out poker cards.
The bikes came in a little after nine.
First a long low rumble off the county road, then the gravel popping under the tires.
I counted sixteen, because counting is what I do when my stomach goes.
They backed in along the fence in one straight row, rear tires to the rail, like they’d done it a thousand times.
Dad had the grandstand microphone. He’d been warming up the crowd all morning.
Then he walked it over to my table on its long orange cord. Somebody had wrapped a knot in that cord with duct tape, years ago, and nobody ever fixed it.
“Folks, before you ride, meet my daughter,” he said. “This is Kelsey. The girl with the helicopter.”
A few people laughed. They always do. They know what’s coming.
“Sixteen years old, puts my truck in the ditch on her learner’s permit,” he said. “Little cut on her chin. And she cries so hard they send a HELICOPTER. Thirty-one thousand dollars, folks. For a Band-Aid.”
He waited for it.
“So ride careful today. Kelsey’s still paying hers off.”
More laughing. Pam Wendt at the coffee urn shook her head and smiled at me, like we were in on it together.
I kept my eyes on the cash box.
Here’s what I remember about that night.
I remember waking up in the passenger seat with glass in my hair.
I remember the steering wheel on the OTHER side of me, and my father slumped over it, smelling like the Elks lodge.
I remember a man with a flashlight and a gray beard holding my hand through the broken window, telling me not to move my neck.
And I remember the next morning, my father leaning over the hospital bed rail.
“You were driving,” he said. “That’s what happened. You understand me?”
I was sixteen.
He was the fair board president, and the deputy who came out that night had played football with him.
So that’s what happened.
Butch Godwin wrote it down exactly the way Dad told it.
The helicopter bill came in my name. Dad paid it. Then the week I turned eighteen he slid a paper across the kitchen table and had me sign it. A hundred and eighty a month until we’re square.
I’m twenty-eight. I’ve paid him $21,600.
Back under the tent, he was still going.
“Tell ’em what you said to the pilot, Kels,” he said. “Go on. Tell them.”
I didn’t say anything. I never do.
Then a shadow came across the table.
The rider from the lead bike had walked up while Dad was talking.
Big man, mid-fifties, a short silver beard kept close. Old faded ink down both arms. A black leather vest gone soft at the edges, nothing under it.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at my father.
“Highway 65,” he said. “October. Mile marker 112, by the grain elevator.”
Dad’s smile stayed on. The microphone came down a few inches.
“That’s right,” Dad said. “You heard this one before?”
“Never heard it told like that,” the man said.
The tent went quiet in a way it never had for the helicopter story.
Pam stopped pouring.
“And who are you?” Dad said.
“Terry Walsh,” the man said. “I’m the one who called it in.”
My hands were flat on the cash box. I couldn’t feel them.
Behind him, the other fifteen had climbed off their bikes and were walking up to the tent. Slow. Nobody in any hurry. The way people walk into a funeral.
Dad laughed, too loud. “Well, then you saw what a mess she was.”
“I saw her in the PASSENGER SEAT, Dale,” Terry said.
Nobody laughed.
Dad’s face went white as the tent.
He put the microphone behind his back like that would turn it off.
“This isn’t the time,” he said.
“You’ve had twelve years of time,” Terry said. “I pulled her out of that truck myself. I drove to the hospital the next day to check on her, and a deputy met me in the lot and told me to go home and FORGET IT.”
He reached inside his vest.
“I didn’t forget it,” he said.
He took out a folded paper, gone soft as cloth from being carried, and held it out.
Not to Dad.
To me.
“Twelve years I’ve ridden past that grain elevator,” he said. “I always figured somebody would come asking for this.”
Dad reached for it first.
Terry didn’t move his hand an inch.
Then my father brought the microphone back around to his mouth, and sixteen riders stood there waiting to hear what he would say.
Pencil on ruled paper
“Folks,” my father said. “Give us ten minutes. Coffee’s on.”
He laid the microphone on my table, on top of the poker cards. The speaker on the grandstand popped once and went to a hum.
Nobody went for the coffee.
I took the paper out of Terry’s hand. It was warm from his chest.
Ruled paper off a spiral pad, the fold lines worn white. Pencil, in block capitals, the way a man writes with a short stub in a truck cab.
I read it standing up.
OCT 11. HWY 65 MILE 112. PICKUP ON ITS SIDE IN DITCH, LIGHTS ON. GIRL ABOUT 16 IN THE PASSENGER SEAT, AWAKE, GLASS IN HAIR. MAN IN DRIVER SEAT, PINNED AT THE CHEST, SMELLS LIKE A BAR. HE SAID DO NOT CALL ANYBODY, I WILL HANDLE IT. I CALLED 911 AT 11:52 PM. T. WALSH.
Under it, a phone number. Same pencil.
I read the middle line again. I will handle it. My father’s words, in a stranger’s hand, and I could hear exactly how he said them.
Dad’s palm came down flat on the paper, on top of my fingers.
“Kels,” he said. No microphone now. “Not here.”
Out at the gate, Butch Godwin had put down his orange flag and stopped waving cars into the grass lot.
He was walking toward the tent. He wasn’t looking at my father.
He was looking at Terry.
The pen from the Elks lodge
The week I turned eighteen, my father sat me down at the kitchen table with a page he’d typed at the fair office. One page. He read it to me out loud, because he said people skip the small print.
“I, Kelsey Ann Randall, agree to repay Dale Randall $31,400 for the medical flight of October 11, at $180 on the first of each month, until paid in full.”
He had his pen from the Elks lodge, black, the gold letters worn off the barrel. He clicked it and held it out.
“I paid that bill out of my own pocket,” he said. “Nobody on the board knows. If they knew, I’d lose my seat, and then what do we have. So this stays in this house.”
I signed.
“Cash or a money order,” he said. “Never a check. A check goes through a bank, and banks keep copies. This is family.”
So on the first of every month for ten years I bought a money order at the Casey’s on Main, a hundred and eighty plus the fee, and slid it in an envelope under his coffee mug on the counter. The envelope was gone by morning.
I kept the stubs. Mom left when I was fourteen and she taught me one thing before she went, which was to keep the receipt. A hundred and twenty stubs, rubber-banded by year, in a boot box under my bed.
I never told Dad about the box. He never asked.
Pam Wendt has kept the fair’s books for nineteen years out of a green ledger the size of a cookbook. At the registration table it rides in the lid of the cash box, because Pam doesn’t trust a computer in a tent. Every fair morning she counts the float with me, writes the number down, and says “good girl” like I’m eight.
She’d done it that morning, too.
The air ambulance service had mailed the entry packet in August. Riders’ liaison, T. Walsh, with a phone number. I’d typed his name on the sign-in sheet at seven a.m. and thought nothing of it. There are a lot of Terrys.
Butch got to the tent before I had the paper folded.
“Terry,” he said. “I told you to go home.”
Twelve-forty
Butch is sixty, wide through the belt, with a county hat he keeps on indoors. He gave the toast at Dad’s fiftieth birthday.
He didn’t take the paper from me. He talked to Terry with his thumbs in his belt, calm, like a man explaining a speed limit.
“You’ve got a page that says what some man smelled in the dark twelve years ago,” he said. “That’s a smell, Terry. The statute on anything out of that night ran in 2017. There’s no court in Missouri.”
“I’m not here for a court,” Terry said.
“Then what are you here for?”
Terry looked at me. He didn’t answer.
“Butch wrote the report,” Dad said. He’d got his laugh back, most of it. “Butch was there, Terry. Butch saw it.”
“What time did you get there, Deputy?” Terry said.
Butch didn’t say anything.
“I’ll tell you. Twelve-forty. I wrote it down in the cab that night, same as the rest. The helicopter lifted at twelve-fifteen. I stood on the shoulder and watched it go with that girl’s shoe in my hand.”
Pam had come out from behind the urn. She stood at the end of my table with her arms folded over her cardigan.
“So when you drove up,” Terry said, “who told you who was driving?”
Butch took his thumbs out of his belt.
“Dale told me,” he said. “He was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance, right there. A man’s entitled to be believed about his own truck.”
“She was gone. There was nobody to ask.”
“I wrote what I was told by a man I’ve known since second grade,” Butch said. “That isn’t a crime.”
Nobody said it was.
A few of the riders had stopped near the fence. The ones from the back of the row, who’d walked up slow, stood close enough to hear and far enough to be polite. Not one of them said a word.
I had stopped counting. I didn’t know what the number was.
Dad took me by the elbow, the way he steers me through the pancake line.
“Kels,” he said. “Behind the grandstand. Now.”
Behind the grandstand
It smells like dust back there, and old fried dough from the Fourth of July. The bleacher boards are over our heads and you can see gravel through the gaps.
He still had my elbow. He let go of it.
“What do you want?” he said. “Say it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Nine thousand eight hundred,” he said. “That’s what’s left. You give me that paper and you tell that man to get back on his motorcycle, and tonight at the kitchen table I tear yours in half. In front of you. Nine thousand eight hundred dollars, Kelsey, gone, for a piece of notebook paper.”
“You said you paid it out of your own pocket,” I said.
“I did.”
“Then what’s it to you?”
He looked at the gravel for a second.
“You know what this town does with a girl who put her father’s truck in a ditch?” he said. “They forgive her. They bring a casserole. I let them think it was you because it’s the kind of thing this town forgives a girl for. You know what they do with a grown man in the driver’s seat with a girl of sixteen beside him?”
He answered his own question by not answering.
“I took that off you. That’s what I did. I was being kind.”
“Twenty-one thousand six hundred,” I said.
“Then you know the math.”
He put out his hand. For the paper.
I looked at his hand. A big hand, hair on the knuckles, the Elks ring. The hand under the mug, the hand on the microphone, the hand on my elbow.
When we came back around the grandstand, Pam was standing at my table.
The cash box lid was open. The green ledger lay on the poker cards with her reading glasses on top of it.
She didn’t look at my father. She looked at me.
“Kelsey,” she said. “Who is it you pay?”
Line fourteen
I told her. The mug, the envelope, the Casey’s on Main.
Pam listened with her mouth set. Then she put her glasses on and turned the book around so it faced me.
“November fourth, twelve years ago,” she said. “Air ambulance, K. Randall, minor. Thirty-one thousand four hundred. Paid out of the emergency fund, check twenty-two oh nine. Approved, D. Randall, president.”
Her finger moved down the page.
“And here. Receivable. K. Randall, to repay the fair at one-eighty a month, beginning the month she turns eighteen. That’s what Dale told the board in closed session. He said you’d bring it to me the first of the month.”
She turned the page. And another.
A hundred and twenty lines, one for each month. Each with a dash after it.
“Not one payment,” Pam said. “Not a dime. I’ve carried you on these books for ten years, honey. I sat across that urn from you every September thinking, that girl’s too proud to come say she can’t.”
“I put it under his mug,” I said.
“I know you did. I know that now.”
“I have the stubs.”
“Every one?”
“One-twenty. Under my bed in a boot box.” I heard my own voice go level. “Counting is what I do.”
Dad had come up beside the table. Butch was behind him, and Terry behind Butch, and behind Terry the riders, in no kind of line.
“Pam,” Dad said. “That’s a board matter.”
“It is,” Pam said. “It’s twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars of board matter.”
She closed the book on her finger.
“Say it again, Dale,” she said. “About whose pocket.”
Sixteen on the gravel
He did say it again. He said a lot of things.
He said Pam was a sweet woman who’d never been good with numbers. He said he’d paid the fair back himself, in cash, in 2015, and Pam had written it on a napkin. Pam said she’d never written anything on a napkin in her life and he could look in the book. He said the book was wrong.
People had come down from the grandstand. Forty, fifty. The pancake line had walked over with their paper plates. Somebody’s kid was holding a funnel cake and not eating it.
“Twelve years,” Dad said. He wasn’t laughing now, and he wasn’t using the voice from the microphone. “Twelve years I fed that girl. Clothed her. Sat in a church pew next to the girl who put me in a ditch, and I never said a word against her. You hear me? Not one.”
“Dale,” Terry said.
“You don’t get to Dale me. You rode in here with a motorcycle club and a piece of paper and you think that makes you a judge.”
“I never said I was.”
“She signed it. It’s got her name. Nobody put a gun to her head.”
“No,” Terry said.
“And you.” He turned on Butch. “You tell them. You tell them what you wrote.”
Butch looked at the gravel. He pulled his hat down by the brim.
“I’m going to go stand at the gate, Dale,” he said.
And he went.
I picked up the microphone.
It was on the poker cards where Dad had left it, the cord running off the table to the grandstand. The switch was still up. The speaker made its hum.
Dad’s hand came out. Mine was already closed.
I said, “I was in the passenger seat.”
It came out of the grandstand speakers a half second late, flat, over the whole fairgrounds, past the fence and the gravel lot and the funnel cake truck.
Nobody clapped. I hadn’t expected anyone to.
I set the microphone down. Pam took out her pen, a cheap one, and wrote in the ledger beside line fourteen. She turned to Terry.
“Mr. Walsh. Will you sign as witness?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I cut that check on Dale’s word with no vote,” she said. She said it to the whole tent. “I’ll say so Tuesday at the board. I’ll say it to the sheriff if he wants it.”
My father stood with his hands open at his sides. He looked at Pam, then at me.
“You walk out of this tent,” he said, “you don’t have a father.”
I took the cash box by its handle and put it in Pam’s arms with the ledger on top.
“Okay,” I said.
The first of the month
The first fell on a Saturday this year.
I stood at the bathroom mirror and pressed my thumb to my chin, where the scar is. A white line the length of a staple. Thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars, he used to say, and I’d never once looked at it as a thing that was just there.
There was no envelope to make. No Casey’s. No mug.
Dad’s truck hasn’t come down my street. Two women at church sat one pew farther off than usual and one of them passed me the bulletin anyway. The sign at the fairgrounds gate still says Pres. D. Randall in gold paint, until Tuesday.
I had the boot box on the kitchen table, the stubs out in their rubber bands. One band for each year. Ten bands.
The phone rang at four.
“Tuesday at seven,” Pam said. “Fair office. There’ll be coffee. I’m not saying you have to.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Bring the stubs, honey.”
“I’ll bring the box,” I said.
I put the lid on the boot box and set it by the door with my keys on top.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s been paying a debt nobody ever let them read.
Family stories have a way of leaving their mark long after the punchline – see the parts-store clock that still runs ten minutes slow and the offer made on the day of a father’s funeral. For another complicated family story, there’s the woman mistaken for Brent’s sister.
