The Wedding Money and the House Money

He stands a little different now. He went out to Dale’s farm last month to help with the corn and came home whistling.

Ashley and Tyler are still saving. They are up to thirteen thousand now. Ashley says when the time comes she doesn’t want a dime from us.

I believe her, and I have also started a separate envelope in the cedar chest, next to the wedding folder.

There is twelve hundred dollars in it so far. It comes out of my Saturday house-cleaning money, which is what I went back to in October, two houses on the north side of town, three hours each.

I do not mind it as much as I said I would. I listen to the radio and think.

Here is what I cannot fix, and why I still lie awake.

Some nights I wake up at two and do the math again. The nine thousand, the eight thousand that would have been left, the seventeen thousand that is left now.

And I think, I could have done eighteen. We would have been all right. Probably.

And then other nights I wake up and think about the co-signing, our names on a loan for a house we do not live in, and I think, I gave too much.

If Jordan gets hurt on a pole, or the clinic closes, that loan is ours too. I took away the cash and gave her a bigger risk.

Then I think about my mother and Jeff’s boat. And I think about Rick at twenty-three, standing in his parents’ kitchen being told there was nothing left.

And I cannot make those two pictures sit still next to each other. They keep sliding around.

I think about how Kelsey heard me on the phone, and skipped her wedding for my sake, and how I thanked the Lord for it at the supper table without even knowing what she had given up. That one I lie awake on the most.

I do not know if I was right. Rick does not know if he was right.

We have stopped trying to settle it between us, and that turns out to be a kind of peace too, the kind you get when you stop pulling on both ends of the same rope.

The wedding picture is back on the hallway wall. I hung it up the night of the kitchen table, after everybody went home. Kelsey is still on the end in her green dress, smiling at something outside the frame.

Next to it, Kelsey made me hang a new one. It is one of the forty pictures I took on my phone in the courthouse parking lot in June.

She had it printed and framed at the drugstore and gave it to me when the paint was dry.

In it, she is sitting on the tailgate of her father’s pickup in her white sundress, eating sheet cake off a paper plate with a plastic fork.

Jordan is laughing next to her. Rick is in the background holding the cake knife.

And I am at the edge of the picture, half cut off because I was the one holding the phone, so all you can see is my arm reaching out to her and the corner of my smile.

I walk past the two of them every morning on my way to the lunchroom. Some mornings one looks like the more expensive picture, and some mornings it is the other one.