Free A Simple Plan by Scott Smith

trip over a chair, my father’s head knocking a fist-size hole in the wall as he went down. Terrified, I rushed into the room with a wad of newspaper, to patch the hole before the ghosts could escape, and at the sight of me—a scrawny, nervous kid in pajamas, my hair tousled with sleep, frantically jamming paper into the wall—my parents broke into hysterical laughter. It was my first memory of embarrassment, of being ashamed, but thinking back on it that morning I felt no bitterness toward them, only a curious sort of nostalgia and longing. I missed them, I realized, still half asleep, my mind wandering, half-dreaming, so that, as I thought of them, they somehow usurped Sarah’s and my places—my mother, young, pregnant, was washing herself in the bathroom while my father waited beneath the covers, the shades pulled down, the room dim, listening to the pipes softly creak behind the wall above his head.
    That was how I always tried to think of my parents, as young—like Sarah and me—with their life together just beginning. It was more invention than recollection: I hadn’t been born very long before things started to fall apart, so the memories I retained of my parents, the real ones, the ones that came floating up unbidden, were from when they were already aging, both of them drinking too much, the farm slipping away behind their backs.
    The last time I saw my father alive, he was drunk. He’d called me at the feedstore one morning, his voice sounding shy and embarrassed, to see if I could stop by sometime and take a look at his accounts. I consented gladly, feeling a little shy myself, but flattered, too, because he’d never really asked me for help before.
    I drove out to the farm that evening, straight from work. My father had a little study that opened directly off the kitchen, and there, on the folding card table he used as a desk, I spent the next fifty minutes disentangling his finances. He kept track of his bills in a huge leather-bound ledger. The book contained a mess of hastily scrawled numbers, columns merging one into the other, computations scribbled illegibly in the margins. He’d written most of the notations in ink, so when he made a mistake—which appeared to have been quite often—he had to cross it out rather than erase it. Even through this morass of disorder, though, it was instantly clear to me that my parents were about to lose their farm.
    I’d known they were in trouble, had known it for as long as I could remember, but I’d never imagined that things could get this far out of hand. They owed money to just about everyone—the electric, phone, and water companies, the insurance company, the doctor, and the government. It was lucky they didn’t have any livestock, because then they would’ve owed Raikley’s, too. They owed money for repairs on their combine, for fuel and seed and fertilizer. Those were just bills, though: they were bad to get behind on, and my parents would’ve had to pay them eventually, but they weren’t how you lost your farm. It was the bank that would take your property, and it was to the bank that my father owed the bulk of his money. He’d overborrowed and mismanaged. He’d mortgaged his home, mortgaged his land, and now, in a matter of weeks, he was going to lose them both.
    I worked for a while before I said anything, organizing numbers into coherent columns, separating his debits from his assets, adding everything up. My father sat behind me on a stool, watching over my shoulder. They’d already eaten dinner, and he was drinking now, whiskey out of a juice glass. The study door was open, and through it we could hear my mother washing dishes in the kitchen. When I finally put down my pencil and turned around to face my father, he smiled at me. He was a large, heavyset man, with a good-sized paunch, and blond, balding hair. His eyes were pale blue, small in his face. They leaked little strings of tears when he drank too much.
    “Well?” he