The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

I poured two mugs of coffee, one for her and one for me, and set them on the table. Kenzie shook her head when I held up a third mug.

Steve was still at work at the co-op until five. It was just us three. I did not sit. I could not make myself sit. I stood at the end of the table with my hand on the back of a chair.

Kenzie did not sit either. She held the little spiral book with the white cover, the one she had carried in from the car, open in her hands between us so we could both see it.

The afternoon light was coming in through the window, and it lit up those white pages like a page in church.

“Aunt Deb,” she said, and her voice shook a little. “I open the mail at our house now. I’ve been opening it since Christmas.”

Lori kept her eyes down on the table.

“I pay the bills,” Kenzie went on. “Mom gives me her checks and I pay what I can and I put the rest in a pile. I thought this was another bill. I almost put it in the pile.”

She looked at her mother. Then back at me.

“Then I opened it and saw your name on every page,” she said. “And the first one.”

On the refrigerator door, under a magnet, Kenzie and Megan looked out from their school portrait. I saw her eyes go to it once and come right back down.

Lori reached into the inside pocket of her denim jacket. She took out a twenty-dollar bill, smoothed it flat with two fingers, and laid it on the table beside her coffee mug.

Then, for the first time since she had walked into my kitchen, she looked up at me.

“Deb,” she said. “I need to tell you about that Jeep.”

I pulled out the chair finally and sat down across from her. My knees would not hold me anymore.

“It isn’t mine,” Lori said. “The Jeep. Not one bolt of it is mine, Deb.”

I didn’t say anything. I let her talk. I had waited two years. I could wait two more minutes.

“It was in the settlement,” she said. “Dale didn’t want to pay me support every month, and his lawyer didn’t want it on paper that way. So they offered a car instead. He leases it through his work, and he pays the lease for three years, and I drive it. That was the deal.”

“My old Pontiac died in March,” she said. “Right on Highway 52, in the sleet. I had to walk to the Casey’s. So I called his lawyer and said, all right, I’ll take the car.”

She laughed, a short ugly laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all.

“It goes back next spring,” she said. “And then I’ll have nothing again. But for a year I get to pull into church in something that looks like I’m doing fine. Do you know how good that felt, Deb? For one Sunday?”

I did know. I sell people their prescriptions every day. I have watched grown women put back their blood pressure pills to pay for their grandson’s inhaler. I know what it costs to look fine.

“Mom,” Kenzie said quietly. “Tell her the rest.”

Lori closed her eyes.