The Card on the Porch Rail

Five dollars a week comes to two hundred sixty dollars a year. Eighteen years of that, with what little interest they pay, came to a bit over forty-eight hundred. Last August I sold tomatoes and sweet corn off a card table at the end of my driveway until I had the rest.

I wanted it to be an even number. I wanted to be able to say it out loud.

So I sat in my Buick on that pretty street with the gold balloons bobbing over the fence, and I thought about going home.

I got as far as the on-ramp.

The sign said north to St. Joseph, and north was home, and I had my blinker on. And I thought, Kathy, you are sixty-eight years old and you have been awake since three. You will fall asleep at the wheel outside of Nebraska City and they will find the Buick in a bean field.

That was the reason I gave myself.

The truer reason was that I could not make myself put nine hours between me and that girl without her knowing I had come.

There was a Budget Inn right there off the interstate, the kind with the doors on the outside and an ice machine that hums under the stairs. I pulled in. The young man at the desk charged me sixty-four dollars and gave me a room on the ground floor because I asked him please not to make me do stairs.

The room smelled like bleach and old cigarettes somebody had tried to cover up with pine. There was a bedspread with brown swirls on it and a window that looked out on the parking lot, and across the parking lot, past a strip of weeds, was a Waffle House with its yellow sign already lit up in the middle of the afternoon.

I took off my shoes. I sat on the edge of the bed.

I had brought a dress for the party, a blue one with small white flowers. It was hanging in the back of the Buick in a dry cleaner’s bag, and I did not go get it.

I took the check out of my cardigan pocket and unfolded it and laid it on the nightstand next to the telephone.

I am going to be honest about why I took it back.

Part of it was plain good sense. A check for five thousand dollars has no business sitting on a porch railing next to a geranium.

Part of it was that I had always meant to put it in her hand. For eighteen years, every Friday at that credit union window, I had pictured the same thing. I would hand it to her myself and I would see her face. I had not pictured handing it to her mother to be logged in a notebook with the gift cards.

And part of it, I will admit, was spine.

I had just been told on a porch that I was not immediate family. Fine. I could swallow that. I had swallowed worse on night shift. But I was not going to say thank you for it with eighteen years of Fridays.

The words were a gift. I left the words.

The money was a promise, and you do not leave a promise with somebody who has just shut a door on you.