Four Envelopes on the Kitchen Table
“I did ask him,” I said. “He told me to leave it. And I could make him. But even if he had a reason, Kim, my kids would still be standing on the outside of that house looking in. I can’t make Mark put money in an account. I can put it there myself.”
“You could call his ex and find out what’s going on,” Kim said. “Dana’s cousin goes to my church.”
“I am not calling his ex-wife to ask about my own marriage,” I said, and she laughed, and that was the end of that idea.
She looked at my screen for a long time. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s your money,” she said.
“You earned every dime of it. If this is what you want it for, then this is what it’s for.”
I clicked the button. The plan said the loan would process in two to three business days. I closed the window and finished my sandwich, and I did not taste a single bite of it.
I did not tell Mark. I want to be honest about that, because some of you will think I was wrong, and maybe I was.
He had told me to leave it, and I was leaving it. I was just leaving it somewhere he could not reach.
The money landed in my checking account on the morning of December 31st. I saw it on my phone while I was scraping the windshield in the dark, ten thousand dollars sitting there in plain numbers, and I put the phone back in my coat pocket and finished scraping.
That night we went to the New Year’s Eve potluck at the Lewiston fire hall, the way we do every year. Mark played euchre with the volunteer firemen and lost, and Sam fell asleep on a pile of coats by ten thirty, and Lily danced with the Pedersen girls to an old Garth Brooks song.
On the drive home, Mark reached across the cab of the truck and put his hand on my knee, the way he used to when we were first dating.
I let it stay there. I did not know yet what I felt, except tired, and sad, and very sure.
New Year’s Day came in bright and cold, ten below at sunrise and the sky that hard clean blue you only get after a front blows through.
Mark was out in the shop by eight, putting a new cutting edge on the plow blade before the next storm.
His mother, Joan, pulled into the yard at eleven in her silver Buick, the way she has every New Year’s Day since we married. She drives over from Wabasha with a crock of sauerkraut on the passenger seat buckled in like a grandchild.
Pork and sauerkraut on the first of the year is for luck, and Joan does not take chances with luck.
Joan is seventy. She raised Mark by herself in a rented house above a hardware store, working the counter at the creamery and later cleaning offices at night. She does not talk much about those years.
She is a small, straight-backed woman with white hair she sets every Saturday, and she has never once made me feel like a second wife.
She came in stamping snow off her boots and kissed me on the cheek. “The kids at Dana’s?” she asked, and I said yes, and she said, “Well, I’ll see them Sunday,” and went straight to the oven to check my pork roast, which she does every year and which I have learned to find comforting.