The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

She shook her head slowly. “Honey, we can’t print those. The coupon books come from the loan system. They only go with loans the bank made. I couldn’t make one for you if I wanted to.”

I must have looked as tired as I felt, because she leaned across the counter and lowered her voice.

“Who’s it for?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Kim had been at St. Mary’s on Sunday too.

She sat back and looked at me for a long minute. Then she clicked around on her computer, frowning at the screen, and the printer behind her started to hum.

“This is just a blank coupon page,” she said, handing me a stack of warm paper. “Anybody can find it online. It’s not a bank form and it’s got no bank name on it. You fill it out yourself. I never gave you anything.”

“Kim,” I said.

“Ten coupons a sheet,” she said. “I gave you eight sheets. You do the math.”

I did the math. Eight thousand dollars, a hundred a month. Eighty payments. A little under seven years.

On the way back to work, I stopped at the library. The library has one of those spiral-binding machines in the back room for the 4-H kids’ record books. Sue at the desk bound my eight sheets into a little book with a plain white card-stock cover, front and back. She charged me three dollars.

She didn’t ask what it was for. Sue is a good librarian.

That night after supper I cleared the kitchen table, wiped it down twice, and sat down with the little book and my good black pen. The one I use for sympathy cards.

Steve dried the dishes and watched me over his shoulder. When he was done, he hung the towel on the oven handle and pulled out a chair.

“What is that?”

I told him. All of it. Kim, the library, my dad and his sun visor.

He picked up the book and turned it over in his big hands. He flipped through the blank coupons. He did not say anything for a long time, and I thought maybe he was going to tell me it was petty.

“Eighty payments,” he finally said.

“A hundred a month,” I said. “She can do a hundred a month. I know what she makes. It’ll hurt, but she can do it.”

“No interest.”

“No interest.”

He nodded slowly. “Your dad would have liked this,” he said. Then he got up, poured us both a cup of decaf, and sat with me while I filled out every single coupon.

It took almost two hours. Payment number. Amount due. Due date. Payable to Deb Kowalski, and our address out on the county road. Eighty times.

My hand cramped somewhere around payment fifty. Steve rubbed my wrist with his thumb and I kept going.

When I got back to the very first coupon, I stopped. I sat there with the pen over it for a long time.

Then I wrote, in the space for the amount paid, “Paid by Deb, for 30 years.”

Steve read it upside down. He reached over and squeezed my hand and did not say anything, because there was nothing that needed saying.

That first hundred was mine to give. Not a gift of the whole thing, the way she wanted to call it. Just one page. One page for every year she had been my best friend. It was the only gift I meant.