The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth
“That was the worst thing I’ve ever said to anyone. I knew it while I was saying it. I thought if I could make you feel foolish enough, you’d give me until fall.” She looked at the check. “Dale sold the side-by-side. And his dad’s shotgun, the good one. The rest is a loan against his truck. He drove me to the credit union himself, and he waited in the parking lot.”
“I want to say something, and I want you to let me finish.”
She nodded.
“I am going to take this. Tomorrow I am carrying it to Mr. Fenske, and it is going into that account with two signatures on it. I am not going to tell him where it came from. He is not going to ask. That’s one thing.”
“All right.”
“The second thing. I forgive you. I decided that before you knocked, somewhere around the hundredth envelope, because I did not want to walk into that hospital carrying it. So that is done, and you did not earn it. That is not how it works anyway.”
She had started to cry, without any noise.
“The third thing is that I am not ready to have you at my table. Not yet. I can’t sit across from you at Mom’s on Sunday and pass the potatoes like it’s last year. I forgive you, and I do not trust you, and I don’t know how long the second one lasts. I’m not going to lie to you about it. We have had enough of that.”
She stood up. She had not touched the coffee. At the door she stopped with her back to me.
“He wrote that he loved me. On the card. He thanked me for making his supper.”
“I know. I almost didn’t send that one.”
“Why did you?”
“Because he meant it. And I thought somebody in all this ought to get to mean what they said.”
She went out. A minute later the buzz of the welder stopped, and I heard Travis’s voice in the garage, low, and hers, and then her car start. I never asked him what he said to her.
On the morning of the seventeenth we were on the road by four-thirty, down Highway 92 toward Omaha in the dark, with the corn about knee high in the headlights and Cody in the back seat without his brace on. They had told him he would not need it again.
When they came to wheel him away, Cody opened his hand. He had been holding something in it since the house. It was Mr. Fenske’s twenty, still folded in thirds, gone soft from his palm.
“Can you hold this? I’m the custodian. I’m not supposed to lose it.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Mom.” He was already a little loose from what they had given him. “Tell Aunt Rhonda she doesn’t have to be the sorry part of the thank-you anymore.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Okay.”
I had never told him. Nobody had. He had licked 140 envelopes and worked it out on his own, and loved her anyway.
Then they took him through the double doors, and I stood in that hallway with a twenty-dollar bill in my fist and Travis’s arm around me, and I was not strong, not for one minute of it.
Five hours and forty minutes. Pastor Jim drove in and sat with us. Around noon Travis went down for coffee and came back with a strange look on his face.
“Your sister’s in the lobby. Down by the fish tank. She says she isn’t coming up. She says she just wanted to be in the building.”