The Fifteen Dollars in My Father’s Hand

Mrs. Novak called the second Sunday to tell me the rest of the tables had gone back down to the basement, unsold. “He carried it down himself,” she said. “Took him two days with those knees, and he was down there a long time after.” She paused. “The light was on till past midnight, Emily. Both nights.”

“Is Sharon still there?”

“She’s there. But she goes out Tuesday mornings and doesn’t come home till dark. Thursdays the same. I don’t know where she’s going. I don’t ask.”

October went by. The corn came out of the fields east of town. I had the dress cleaned by a woman in Omaha, and she sent it back in tissue, in a new box with a window in the lid. She could not close the pinhole. “You’ll always be able to find it if you know where to look,” she said.

I told her that was all right. I found I did not want it gone.

On the first Sunday in November, a little after two in the afternoon, a truck door shut outside my duplex.

It was my father’s Silverado, the white one, eleven years old. I went to the front window.

He had the bed loaded and tarped, tied down with yellow ratchet straps, square and tight, the way he does everything. He was standing at the tailgate with his cap in his hand, looking at my front door like a man working up to something.

Sharon was in the passenger seat. She was not getting out.

I opened the door before he could knock.

“Em,” he said.

“Dad.”

“I’ve got the rest of it.” He tipped his head at the truck. “All of it. I went through every box. Took me the better part of a month.” He turned the cap around in his hands. “I should’ve done it seven years ago, with you sitting right there next to me. I’m sorry I didn’t. I’m sorry you had to hand me money to get me to look at my own driveway.”

It was the longest speech I had ever heard him make.

“Come in, Dad,” I said.

“Let me carry first.”

So he carried. Nine boxes, up my three front steps, one at a time, and he would not let me take a single one. He had relabeled them. I could see where the old marker had been crossed out and new words written under it in his square capitals. Janet, kitchen. Janet, sewing. Janet, letters. Janet, Christmas. One said only, Emily ought to have these.

My front room filled up with my mother.

The last thing he brought in was not a box. It was flat, wrapped in a bath towel, and he carried it against his chest with both arms.

He set it on my kitchen table and folded the towel back.

It was the photograph from the hallway. The one that had come down the month before he married Sharon. My parents on the steps of the church on Military Avenue, June 15, 1991, squinting into the sun. My father thin as a fence post in a gray tuxedo with his ears sticking out. My mother laughing at something off to the side, one hand holding her veil against the wind.

And the sleeves. Those long lace sleeves, in ninety-six degrees.

“I’d forgotten she was laughing,” I said.

“Marie Novak had just dropped the ladle in the punch bowl. Clear to the bottom. Your mother thought it was the funniest thing she ever saw.” He touched the edge of the frame. “I need to tell you something about this picture, and I need you to let me get through it.”

“All right.”