For Dad’s loan.
There was a small notebook with a blue cover, open, with a column of numbers going down the page. One line every Saturday, a date and then a number, and the number getting smaller every week.
And there was a piece of paper folded in four, gone soft at the creases, in my husband’s handwriting.
An IOU.
I owe Gus Tennant four thousand two hundred pounds, to be paid back as soon as I’m working again.
Signed Aldous. Dated two months before he died.
Finn had found it in his dad’s desk drawer, in the October, looking for a pen.
And for six months, every single Saturday, he had been slipping his wages into the diner’s till in one of those envelopes.
To pay back his father’s debt to the man he was washing up for.
Almost there.
It was never the bike money going up.
It was the debt going down.
Gus found out about four months in, when the till kept coming up over at the end of Saturday and he could not work out why.
He sat Finn down in that office. He told him to stop. He told him there was no debt. He told him twice more over the next six weeks.
Finn kept doing it.
That afternoon, Gus caught him at the till with an envelope in his hand, and took hold of his wrist, and said he was ringing his mum.
And Finn pulled away, and grabbed his bag, and caught a whole rack of plates on the way.
That was the crash.
And the mud.
When Gus would not take it from the till any more, Finn started taking it to his house.
Along the creek path, which is a shortcut to the lane where Gus lives, to push the envelopes through his letterbox after work.
On the Saturday he came home at eight, he had slipped down the bank in the half-dark and gone into the water up to his knees.
The fall was true.
It was the only true thing he told me in six months.
PART 4
Then Gus told me the rest, in that office, with Finn sitting in the corner on an upturned crate and not looking at either of us.
He tore that IOU up at the funeral.
Right there, in the car park, in front of Aldous’s brother, before I had even come out of the church. He never wanted a single penny of it and he had never meant to.
