The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

“What loan?”

Lori Schultz said it to me in the parking lot of St. Mary’s on the third Sunday in April, standing beside a Jeep so new it still had the dealer’s paper plate in the back window.

I had waited for the after-Mass crowd to thin out. I had waited for the Hanson sisters to finish admiring the heated seats and for Father Tom to go back inside. I had been careful.

“Lor, I’m so glad things are better,” I had said, low, just for her. “Could we talk about the loan sometime? No hurry. Just sometime.”

She looked at me like I had slapped her across the face in front of the whole parish. Her mouth went flat. Her keys went still in her hand.

“What loan?” she said again, and then louder, loud enough that two women by the church steps turned their heads. “Deb, that was a gift.”

Then she got into that Jeep, pulled the door shut, and backed out so fast the gravel ticked against my husband’s truck two spaces over.

I stood there with my church purse on my arm and my good shoes sinking into the soft spring gravel, and I did not know what to do with my hands.

I am forty-nine years old. I have been a pharmacy tech at the drugstore on Main Street for twenty-two years. I count pills for a living. I know how to count.

And I knew what I had handed her. I knew exactly how much, and exactly whose money it was, and exactly what we had given up so she could have it.

Steve came around the tailgate. He had heard. You could tell by the way he was holding his jaw, like a man trying not to say a thing he could not take back.

“Get in, Deb,” he said gently, and opened my door for me, which he has not done since our anniversary dinner three years ago.

We drove home the long way, out past the Kleinschmidt place and the grain bins, and neither of us said a word until we were nearly to our own mailbox.

“You want me to go talk to her?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Because I will. I’ll be nice about it.”

“I know you would,” I said. “No.”

He let out a long breath through his nose and turned into the driveway. He didn’t argue. Steve has never once argued with me about Lori, not in twenty-six years of marriage.

He knows what she is to me. Everybody in town knows. Deb and Lori, like it was one word. We have been best friends since we were nineteen years old.

We met the summer we were both nineteen, working side by side at the county fair over in West Union. I ran the church lemonade stand. She sold pork burgers for the Pork Producers in the stand next door.

The first night, she ran out of change in her cash box and came over to borrow a roll of quarters. She stayed and talked until they turned the midway lights off.

That is how it was with Lori. She came over for a roll of quarters and stayed thirty years.

She stood up at my wedding. I stood up at hers. When my mother was dying, Lori drove the forty minutes to the nursing home every Wednesday night for four months so I could sleep.