The Envelope I Carried Every Friday
The drive-through lane at Crawford County State Bank holds three cars, and on Friday afternoons around ten after four I am usually the third one.
I keep my window down, even in January. The drawer slides out on its steel track, I set an envelope in it, and Marcy Vukovich draws it back through the glass. She looks at the envelope. In all those months she has never once looked at me.
There is nothing written on it. That was my rule from the first week. No name, no initials, no amount. Just four numbers in pencil on the flap, the last four digits of a loan I have never seen with my own eyes.
“Receipt,” Marcy says through the little speaker, and the drawer comes back with a slip folded in half. Third party payment, it says in gray type. Nothing else.
I fold the slip in thirds and put it in my shirt pocket behind my reading glasses. Then I drive home forty minutes later than I ought to, to a wife who believes the plant has cut my hours.
That is the whole secret, and I carried it for fifty-one Fridays.
The man on the press brake
My name is Rudy Sallee. I am 66 years old, and I have run a press brake at Crawford Fabrication, on the south side of Pittsburg, Kansas, for forty years this past August. We bend steel for trailer frames and grain bins. It is the only thing anyone has ever paid me to be good at.
We live in Arma, a few miles up the highway from the plant, in a brick ranch house we finished paying off the year our son Bryce started college. We have a pecan tree, a vegetable garden, and a garage with a workbench my father built. We owe nobody a dime.
Norene is 64. She ran the lunch line at Arma Elementary for twenty-nine years, and half the grown men in Crawford County still call her Miss Norene when they see her at the Price Chopper. They stand a little straighter when they do it. We had been married forty-two years that June.
Bryce sells farm insurance in Wichita. Our daughter Rochelle teaches third grade in Joplin and has two boys who think their grandmother invented pancakes.
On top of our refrigerator sits a Folgers can with a plastic lid. Every Friday since 1989, Norene has put a five-dollar bill in that can, out of the grocery money, no matter what kind of week it was. She has emptied it twice, once for Bryce’s books and once for Rochelle’s first car, and started over both times without a word.
The can is for Oregon.
Norene has never seen an ocean. When she was a girl there was a calendar on her mother’s kitchen wall with a photograph of a beach, big black rocks standing up out of the water like loaves of bread, and she says she looked at it every morning through the eighth grade. She does not call it a dream. She just says “when we go to Oregon,” the way other women say “when we go to town.”
That fall the can held $3,860. We had a plan. Our forty-second anniversary, early June. Fly to Portland, rent a car, drive out to the coast, three nights in a motel where you could hear the water from the bed. I had printed the motel’s web page at the library and put it in the drawer under the phone book.