The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

When Kenzie was born, Lori put that baby in my arms in the hospital and said, “You’re the godmother, don’t argue.” I didn’t argue. I have never missed one of that girl’s birthdays.

So when Lori’s husband left her two springs ago, I was the first phone call. Not her mother. Not her sister in Waterloo. Me.

Dale didn’t leave quietly, either. He left on a Tuesday with a woman from his work, and by Friday he had a lawyer from Cedar Rapids and a list of everything he thought he was owed.

Lori sat at my kitchen table that Friday night with her mascara down to her chin and a letter from his lawyer flat on the table between us. She had read it so many times the folds were going soft.

“He wants the house,” she said. “He wants half my retirement. He wants to say I’m the reason. Deb, I can’t even afford to answer this.”

She had called a lawyer in Decorah that afternoon. He was a decent man, by everything I had heard, but he wanted a retainer before he would do a thing, and the whole divorce was likely to run eight thousand before it was over.

Lori worked as a nurse aide at the care center. She made fifteen dollars and change an hour. She did not have eight thousand dollars. She did not have eight hundred.

I looked at Steve, who was leaning in the doorway with his coffee, and he looked at me. We have been married long enough that we did not need to say it out loud.

We had been saving for a new roof. Our shingles were twenty-five years old and curling at the edges, and every spring Steve went up the ladder with a bucket of tar and a prayer.

We had a little over nine thousand in the savings account at the bank. It had taken us four years to get there, putting away what we could out of his check from the co-op and mine from the pharmacy.

Steve set his cup down on the counter. He went to the desk drawer in the front room, came back with the checkbook, and sat down across from Lori.

“Who do I make it out to?” he asked her. “You, or the lawyer?”

Lori just stared at him. Then she put her face in her hands and cried harder than I had seen anybody cry since my mother’s funeral.

Steve wrote the check to her, eight thousand dollars, in his slow square handwriting. He tore it out, folded it once, and slid it across the table to me so I could be the one to hand it to her.

That was the kind of thing Steve did. He knew it mattered more coming from me.

“Whenever you can, Lor,” I told her. “There’s no hurry. You get through this first.”

“I’ll pay you back,” she said into her hands. “Every penny. I swear to God, Deb.”

“I know you will,” I said. “Don’t swear in my kitchen.”

She laughed through the crying, and that was the end of it. No note. No signatures. No interest. Steve didn’t want it, and I would have been ashamed to ask.

Thirty years of friendship doesn’t need a signature. I believed that with my whole heart. I still mostly do.