The Card My Husband Left Me

I turned the page. The first of February. Two hundred dollars. The first of March. The first of April. The first of May. I turned another page and my hands had started to shake and I could not make them stop. Line after line after line, the first of every single month, for six years. Two hundred. Sometimes three. Once, after harvest one year, four hundred. The first of every month, without one single gap, for seventy-two months, in a hand I would know anywhere, the same cramped pencil that wrote “be well.”

I looked up at Nadine and I could not speak.

“He came in the first of every month,” she said, quiet, the way you talk in a sickroom. “Rain or dry. He would come to my window, he would not use the young ones, and he would push the cash under the glass and he would say, ‘That is for Ellen. For when she is ready.’ Every month, Ellen. Six years. He came in the second of March this year because the first was a Sunday. Two days before he passed. He was so weak that time Carl had to help him up the step, and he put in two hundred dollars, and he said the same thing he always said. ‘That is for Ellen. For when she is ready.'”

I stood at that window and I read the number at the bottom of the last column. It was a little over twenty-six thousand dollars. Twenty-six thousand dollars, built two and three hundred at a time, by a man living in one rented room above a hardware store on a scale house wage, a man I had turned my face from in church, a man I had let the whole town tell me had run off to a warm house with a younger woman and her insurance money.

I asked Nadine the only thing I could get out of my mouth. I asked her where he got it.

“He sold his tools,” she said. “The good ones, the ones his daddy left him. He sold the truck, the new one, and drove that old brown one till it died. He kept the scale house job as long as his heart let him stand at the window, and when it would not let him stand he sat on a stool, and when they wanted to let him go easy on account of his health he begged Merle to keep him on at half days because, he told Merle, he had a thing he had to finish. He never once touched the farm money, Ellen. Never a dollar. He lived on next to nothing in that room so that this”, and she put one finger on the passbook, “would be here when you came. We all wondered when you would come.”

I want to tell you I understood it right then. I did not. I understood the money. The money was plain, it was written down in columns, I could count it. What I did not understand yet was why. Why leave at all. Why “be well” and not one word of this in six years. Why let me believe what I believed. The money only made it worse for a minute, because a man who did not love me would not do this, and so now I had a man who loved me and still walked out and still let me go to my grave thinking the worst, and I could not make those two things be the same man.