The Box Only Marge Could Open

I keep my household accounts in green columnar ledgers, the cloth-bound kind with the red corners. Don used to say I was the only woman in Iowa who ran her kitchen like a grain elevator. I started the first one in January of 1979, the month after we married, and I have never missed a month. They are on the bottom shelf of the hall bookcase, under the encyclopedias. Fourteen of them now.

I did not need to fix anything in them. That was the point. I only needed to decide what I was going to show and what I was going to say, and what I was not.

Because there was a line in the 2019 book that I had never spoken out loud to anyone.

You will remember the flood that spring, if you live anywhere near the Missouri. The bomb cyclone, the television called it. The snow went off all at once onto frozen ground, and the creeks came up, and then the river. We were lucky in our town compared to the folks down in Fremont County, but Cedar Street sits low. Greg and Lisa had four feet of water in their basement for the better part of a week. It took the furnace, the water heater, the washer and dryer, the freezer with half a beef in it, and it cracked the east foundation wall.

Their insurance did not cover rising water. Hardly anybody’s did.

Don had been gone a year and a half. I had his life insurance sitting in the credit union, not a fortune, but there. In September, when the contractor finally gave them a number for the wall and they were heating the house with two space heaters and a prayer, I drove over and wrote a check at their counter.

Nine thousand dollars. Check number 4417.

Greg said he would pay it back inside of two years. He meant it. I could see he meant it. I said there was no hurry, and I meant that too.

Then came the next year, when nobody’s plans meant anything, and the dealership cut his hours, and Tyler needed braces, and the transmission went out on the Buick. I know all that. I watched all that. Not one payment came, and not one word, and after a while the not saying became its own piece of furniture in the room.

I never brought it up. Not at a single Christmas. Not when they bought the camper. I wrote it in my book the day I lent it, the way I write everything, and I carried it forward every year to the first page of the new ledger, and I shut the cover.

So that was what I had to decide. Whether to open the book to that page.

I prayed about it Thursday night, plainly, the way I pray about anything. I was not after shaming him. I have sat through enough church quarrels to know what shame does to a man. It does not make him sorry. It makes him sore.

But I thought about him saying, somebody ought to keep an eye on your bills. And I thought, he does not know who I am. Fourteen years in this family, and he still thinks I am a nice old woman with a checkbook in a drawer. Part of that was my doing. I had never shown him. I had never shown anybody. I was raised that you do not talk about money, so I had kept it all behind a cloth cover, and into that silence Greg had poured his own worry.