The Heart of the Matter

Paintings of Dad I did after he died.

“How could I have been so dumb?” Dad asked for the millionth time, pounding his fist on the steering wheel, shaking his head in a merciless chide.

We were driving home from a meeting with a big-city lawyer, groping for a legal remedy to what was, at heart, a failure of character and far beyond the reach of the law. Our three-hour drive barely gave us enough time to sort out our thoughts.

The story’s beginning was laughably old-fashioned. My father started out as a building contractor in 1958 with the help of three men: Tom Haggerty, Frank Messmer, and Granddad. Tom and Frank were contractors themselves. Still, they didn’t begrudge loaning Dad the $2,500 he needed to buy a table saw and build a garage-sized shop behind his house. Dad started by fixing storm doors and repairing window sills—enough to support his wife and three small children. Giving a young man a hand up was our small town version of a barn-raising. Generosity had no downside.

Dad kept his word. He paid Tom and Frank back within a year. Five years later Granddad was dead, but he’d lived long enough to know his son was well set in business.

In 1968, ten years after that first table saw, Dad built the Engineering Science building at our local university, eight stories high and the biggest concrete structure in Montana. By that same year, Mom had attained family status as World’s Best Cook. We swooned over her tuna casserole, groaning in anticipation as the serving spoon crackled through a crust of crushed potato chips, heaping our plates with steaming piles of creamy noodles. I didn’t know tuna casserole cost about a dollar to make for a family of five. I didn’t know we were poor.

This I did know: You paid the subcontractors first. I knew that better than I knew “stop, drop, and roll” if the house started on fire. I didn’t know that paying the subs meant that sometimes Dad didn’t get paid. I didn’t know that’s why we loved tuna casserole.

I worried so much about the subs that when Mom took me to Kiddieville to buy a three-tiered pastel dress for my piano recital I pitched a fit—fell on the floor in tears, bawling, “No! No! We’re! Too! Poor!” I was desperate to sacrifice my seven dollar dress to do my part.

In 1990 Dad and Mom traveled first class to Washington D.C. to accept the Small Business Administration’s Award for Excellence as the Regional Prime Contractor of the Year. It had been thirty-two years since that first loan, that first table saw, and that first storm door made new.

When Dad retired, he wanted to give a hand up to another young man trying to get into the business—Dad’s own tribute to Tom Haggerty and Frank Messmer and Granddad. In 1993, in a deal consummated over coffee and memories and good will and a co-signed bank loan, Dad handed his company to Joe with $16 million dollars worth of business and a booming economy. Seven years later, Joe stopped paying Dad.

That Joe would filch so flagrantly on his debt left us stupefied. But he took the collective breath away from our family when he continued to pay himself, but stopped paying the subs. Subcontractors with little babies of their own, eating their own version of tuna casserole, trying to pull together a business with a couple of trucks and a back breaking amount of work. Subcontractors who never could get all the dirt off their hands no matter how long the shower or how hot the water or how abrasive the soap.

So, over two million dollars later, my father’s retirement account and retirement plans in tatters, the subcontractors got paid. Dad paid them himself.

On our long car ride home, Dad kept up his scold. “I should have shut him down back when he quit making payments, but I wanted so desperately for him to succeed. I just let my heart get the best of me, that’s all. I guess I’ve learned my lesson.”

I felt sick. Dad was wrong. “That might be the lesson you take from this, Dad,” I said, launching into my own lecture, “but I want you to know as your daughter that’s not the lesson I take. Dave from Tinworks stopped me on the street a couple of months ago and told me that if it hadn’t been for you, he’d never be in business. You believed in him and gave him his first big job.” My voice rose as if its urgency or conviction would cause the numbers in my father’s bank account to rise. “Some woman named Deanna—I don’t even know her!—stopped by my table in a restaurant just last week and told me you saved her family and that she owed you a debt she could never repay. She said her alcoholic husband drank every pay check before he got home on Friday nights. You walked into the Scoop Bar, loaded him into your airplane and flew him to the rehab center in Billings in a snowstorm. Then you paid the bill and gave him his job back when he got out.” Memories of the times Dad sent a couple of guys over to fix someone’s roof, or traded a pig for payment, or arranged to send a whole busload of kids to the circus ran circles in my throbbing head.

“He didn’t pay the subs!” Dad repeated, his mind stuck on this unthinkable betrayal.

“I know, Dad. But you did.” While Dad was cashing in his mutual funds to pay plumbers and brick layers and electricians, Joe was careering down Space Mountain on a family vacation at Disney World. It galled me. At that moment, all I wanted—desired like an addiction—was that Joe suffer, that he lose absolutely everything dear to him, even for one despairing moment, so he would know how it felt. So he would change.

I turned to Dad. “Your heart didn’t get the best of you, Dad. Your heart is the best of you.” I reached out to grab his calloused hand, holding on as if to regain my balance. “I wish mine were the best of me.”