The Fifteen Dollars in My Father’s Hand

“Sharon never took this down. I did.” He said it to the photograph. “A month before the wedding. She never asked me to. I just thought that was what a man was supposed to do, to be fair to a new wife. Put the old one away. And once I’d done it to the picture, it got easier to do it to the canisters, and the afghan, and all the rest of it. I’d hear you ask where something went and I’d tell you it was safe downstairs, and I’d feel like I’d handled it.” He shook his head. “I started that, Em. Sharon only finished what I’d been doing for two years. She’s got her part in it and she knows it. But I’m not going to stand in your kitchen and let her carry mine.”

I looked at my father for a long moment.

I had waited two years for him to hear me. I had not once thought about what it would cost him when he finally did.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said.

He nodded. Then he unbuttoned his shirt pocket, and he took out a ten and five one-dollar bills, folded once, soft at the crease from being carried.

“I can’t spend this,” he said. “I can’t put it in the bank. I’ve had it in whatever shirt I had on since that day, and I can’t seem to do anything with it.” He laid it on the table next to the photograph. “It’s yours.”

I did not pick it up yet.

“Dad, why is Sharon sitting in the truck?”

He let out a breath. “She didn’t think she ought to come to your door without being asked. I told her you weren’t like that. She said it wasn’t about what you were like.” He glanced at the window. “She’s got something for you. She wouldn’t let me bring it in. Said it wasn’t hers to send by somebody else.”

I put on my shoes and went out.

Sharon rolled the window down when she saw me coming. She had something on her lap, wrapped in a clean white sheet, and both her hands were resting on it.

“Emily.”

“Hi, Sharon.”

“Your dad showed me that line in my notebook. The four dollars. I didn’t know what it was when I sold it. I thought it was scraps.” She swallowed. “That’s not an excuse. I didn’t look. I’m only telling you what happened.”

“I know.”

“The woman who bought it, I knew her face. Not her name. I’d handed her her glasses across the counter a dozen times, back when I worked the desk at the eye doctor’s. So I drove to Wahoo and sat down with the girls at my old office until we figured out who she was.”

“Her name is Dorothy. She’s eighty-one. She lives out by Arlington and she quilts with the ladies at her church every Tuesday, for the mission boxes.” Sharon’s voice was not steady. “I went out there to buy it back. I took a hundred dollars with me. And she’d already had the blocks out on her table, Emily. She said she could tell by the stitching that somebody had loved whoever those little dresses belonged to, and it bothered her that it wasn’t finished.”

I had my hand on the truck door. I do not remember putting it there.