The Payment Book I Mailed My Best Friend

“They cut my hours at the care center in October,” she said. “New owners. They brought in agency girls on weekends, and they cut all of us down to thirty hours. I’ve been picking up overnights at the gas station in Calmar to make up for it.”

“The electric co-op sent a shut-off notice in January,” Kenzie said. “I paid it with my paycheck from Casey’s. She doesn’t know I did that.”

Lori’s eyes came open, and she stared at her daughter. Kenzie lifted her chin and stared right back.

“I’m nineteen, Mom,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

For a long moment nobody in my kitchen said anything at all. The coffeemaker clicked off. A tractor went by out on the county road.

“So when you asked me in the parking lot,” Lori said, looking at the twenty on the table instead of me, “I had eleven dollars in my checking account. Eleven dollars. And the Hanson sisters were standing right there by the steps, and Father Tom was right inside the door.”

“I couldn’t say it,” she said. “I couldn’t say I can’t pay you, I can’t pay anybody, I’m drowning. Not there. Not with that car behind me. So I said the worst thing I could think of instead, so you’d stop asking.”

“A gift,” I said.

“A gift,” she said. “And then I couldn’t take it back. Every day I didn’t take it back, it got harder. I quit coming to coffee because I couldn’t look at you. I quit answering. I knew if I looked at you I’d fall apart.”

She put her face in her hands, the same way she had at this same table two springs before.

“I’m so ashamed, Deb,” she said through her fingers. “I was too proud to tell you I was poor, so I let you think I was a thief. And you’re the last person on God’s earth I’d steal from.”

I want to say I said something wise right then. I didn’t. I sat there and cried with her, and Kenzie stood over us both with that little white book in her hand and cried too.

When I could talk again, I told her the part that was mine to tell.

“I should have come to your house,” I said. “Not the church lot. I thought I was being careful. I wasn’t. I was hurt, and I wanted you to see that Jeep and feel ashamed. Part of me did. I’m sorry for that part.”

Lori wiped her face with the cuff of her jacket and shook her head. “You were nicer about it than I’d have been.”

“I mailed you a payment book, Lor.”

“You marked the first one paid,” she said, and her voice broke all over again. “For thirty years. I sat on the bathroom floor and read that one coupon for an hour.”

Then she reached into her jacket again.

She took out four more twenties, folded in half together, soft from being handled. She smoothed them one at a time and laid them on top of the first one.

“A hundred,” she said. “I’ve had it in my pocket since Tuesday. I drove out your road three times this week and turned around at the Kleinschmidt place every time. Kenzie finally took my keys.”

“I took her keys,” Kenzie confirmed, and almost smiled.