The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth

Travis was at the table with a cup of coffee and the hospital paperwork. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he got up and opened the door himself.

She looked like she had not slept since the mail came. No makeup. An old sweatshirt of Dale’s. She had an envelope in both hands, holding it against her stomach.

Travis held the screen door wide. He did not say one thing he had been saving up, and I knew he had a month of it saved. He poured her a cup of coffee, set it at the place across from mine, and said, “I’ll be out in the garage. Gene’s stock gate isn’t going to weld itself.” He stopped with his hand on the knob. “Cody’s asleep. Keep it down, the both of you.”

Then he went out, and I heard the garage light hum on, and I have never loved that man more.

Rhonda did not sit. She put the envelope on the table and slid it to me with two fingers.

It was a cashier’s check from the credit union in Fremont, made out to me. Eight thousand two hundred and fourteen dollars.

“Dale opened the card,” she said.

I waited.

“I’d been getting to the mailbox first for a year, on account of the bills. The one day I didn’t, he did. Then he read what Cody wrote on the bottom.” Her mouth worked. “He did not say a word to me, Beth. He set it on the counter and went and stood on that deck for an hour. Then he came in and asked me one question. He asked if it was the supper.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.” She sat down all at once, like her knees had been waiting. “It was the first true thing I’d told him in about two years.”

She had three credit cards Dale did not know about. It had started with Christmas the year his hours were cut, and then a transmission. By that April two of them had gone to collections and they were calling her at work, at the front desk of the clinic, where anybody could hear. She owed a little over nineteen thousand dollars, and she had told her husband every month that they were fine.

“And then there was eight thousand dollars on my kitchen table,” she said. “In a bank bag. And you were in Omaha, and Dale was asleep, and I sat there and looked at it until two in the morning.”

“You could have told me when you called that night. I would have understood being scared about money, Rhonda. I had been scared about money for two years.”

“I told myself I was borrowing it. I paid off the two that were calling. Forty-six hundred. I was going to put it back when the tax refund came, and then the refund was eleven hundred dollars.” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “And there was thirty-six hundred left, and Dale kept asking why we could never do one nice thing for the kids if we were fine. So I did one nice thing for the kids. I told him I’d been putting money by. I bought the pool so the lie would hold up.”

I had imagined a good many reasons, that month. Greed, mostly. I had not imagined that my sister had built a swimming pool to hide behind.

“And what you said to me on the deck. About who would believe it.”

She took her hands down.