Thirty Suppers With No Charge

The envelope

Tracy sat down across from me. She put the envelope on the table between us and pushed it over with two fingers. It was a plain white bank envelope, and it was thick.

“That’s a hundred and sixty eight dollars,” she said. “I’ve been putting it together since about day ten. I wanted to give it back to you in cash, so you’d know I wasn’t just moving numbers around on my phone.”

I did not touch it. I looked at Greg, and Greg looked at the table, and then he looked up at me, and I saw that big quiet man’s eyes were wet.

“Greg lost his job last March,” Tracy said. “The week before your surgery. They let go of sixty people at the window plant, and he was one of them. Twenty two years, and they gave him a box for his things and eight weeks of pay.”

“Tracy,” Greg said softly.

“No, I’m telling her. I should have told her ten months ago.” She took a breath.

“We had the boys’ last tuition payment due in May. We had the truck payment. We had my car. And I could not make myself say it, Jill. Not to Doug’s mother, not to anybody. Not to you.”

“Why not to me?” I said. It came out smaller than I meant it to.

Tracy laughed, a short, unhappy laugh. “Because you work at the bank. Because you see everybody’s money in this town. I know you’d never say a word, I know that. But I couldn’t stand the thought of you knowing. I was the one who had it all together. I was the one with the binder.”