The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

“Deb,” he said. “It’s eight thousand dollars. I know it was the roof. But I’d rather lose eight thousand dollars than watch you lose thirty years over it.”

“I know,” I said.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But I’m not going to scream at her. And I’m not going to let her pretend.”

I spent most of that night awake, going through every way it could go.

I could take her to small claims. Steve’s cousin did that once over a fence. But a cancelled check only proves I handed her money, not that it was a loan, and I had not one line in her handwriting, and small claims in Iowa only goes up to sixty-five hundred anyway. I looked it up on my phone at one in the morning.

And even if I could have, I was not going to stand up in a courthouse in West Union and sue my best friend over a handshake. I would rather eat the roof.

I could call her. But she had already said it to my face, in front of the church. If I called, she would either hang up or say it again, and the second time would be worse than the first. People dig in on the phone.

I could talk to Father Tom. But that felt like tattling, and it would put him in the middle of something that was not his to fix.

I could do nothing. Let it go. Forgive the debt and never mention it again. I had done that for two years already, and look where it had got me. Standing in gravel holding my purse.

Around three in the morning I thought about my dad.

When I was a girl, my dad bought a used Chevy pickup from the dealer in Oelwein, and the bank gave him a little coupon book for the loan. He kept it clipped to the sun visor in the truck.

Every month, on the first, he would tear out a coupon, write the check, and put them both in an envelope. And every month he would show me the book getting thinner.

“That’s how you pay a thing back, Debbie,” he used to say. “One page at a time. Nobody can do it all at once.”

I sat straight up in bed. Steve grunted and rolled over.

That was it. I did not want a fight. I did not want a lawyer. I wanted to put something in Lori’s hands that said what I could not say in that parking lot. That it was a loan. That I remembered. That I was not going away.

And that she could do it one page at a time. That I was not asking for it all at once. That I knew she could not.

Monday on my lunch break I walked down Main Street to the bank. Kim Ruther has worked the front window there since we were all in high school, and she has seen every check I have ever written.

“I need a payment book,” I told her. “Like the ones you do for car loans.”

Kim tipped her head at me over her glasses. “For what loan, Deb? You don’t have anything with us but checking and savings.”

“It’s a private loan,” I said. “Between me and somebody.”