The Envelope He Took Back Off the Mantel
“I’ll tell him,” he said, and his voice had gone to gravel.
Then he noticed the little wrapped square in her other hand. She had carried it out without thinking.
“Is that the one you had yesterday? For your grandma?”
Emma nodded.
“You hold on to that,” Roy said. “Don’t you send it with me. She’ll have to come for that one herself.”
She did not come that week, or the week after.
Kim told me later that her mother did not speak to Roy for three days when she found out where he had been. She said Paul had embarrassed her in front of the family.
Then the tax bill came, the second week of January.
Roy set it on the kitchen table and did not say a word about it. Kim was there. She said he got her mother’s coffee can down off the shelf over the stove and set it beside the bill, empty, and that Barb sat and looked at it a long time. Barb fills that can all year, a five here and a ten there out of the grocery money, and it comes to about five hundred dollars by December. It had come to five hundred and ten that year.
That was why there were five envelopes. She had five hundred dollars and seven children, and instead of giving every child seventy, she had decided which five were hers.
They paid the first half out of savings, and it left them thin. Paul let them, and it cost him to do it.
Roy did not wait on her. He came to Ben’s basketball game at the church gym the second Saturday in January and sat on the bleachers beside me with a bag of popcorn, and when Ben made a basket, his only one of the season, Roy stood straight up. He brought a level and hung the shelf in Emma’s room that Paul had been meaning to get to.
Barb called Paul once, on a Sunday night. I was sitting right beside him on the couch.
“You tell those children Grandma’s sorry if their feelings got hurt,” she said. I could hear her plain. “And you bring them to dinner next Sunday, and we’ll put it behind us.”
“No, ma’am,” Paul said.
“Paul.”
“I’m not going to carry it for you, Mom. It isn’t me you owe it to, and it isn’t Sarah. You said it to their faces. You said it in front of everybody they know. If you’re sorry, you’ll say that to their faces, too, and you’ll use their names.” He was gentle about it. That is the thing I keep coming back to. “The door’s open. It’s open today and it’ll be open in a year. But it’s that door, and no other one.”
She hung up on him.
“She’s my mother,” he said. “I love her. I hate this. I’m still not moving.”
It was the last Saturday in January, a little after one in the afternoon, when a car I knew pulled into our driveway and sat.
Barb does not like to drive in winter. Roy does the driving. But it was Barb’s tan Buick, and she was alone in it, and she had brought it nine miles down Route 60 on a day with slush on the shoulders.
She came up the walk with a paper grocery sack held against her chest in both arms. She had her church coat on.
I opened the door.