The Envelope I Carried Every Friday

The lie I told in the kitchen

The next problem was Norene.

I knew exactly what she would say if I told her. She would say yes before I got to the end of the sentence, and she would reach for the Folgers can, and I did not want her touching that can.

That can was Oregon. It was thirty-seven years of Fridays. I could not stand the idea of my wife having to choose between the ocean she had waited for her whole life and a woman from the quilting circle. She had already chosen once, on a Thursday in her own kitchen, and I had watched what it cost her to say “we can’t.”

So I decided I would not make her choose again. I would just handle it.

But a hundred and ninety dollars a week leaves a hole in a household, and Norene could tell when one jar of pickles was missing from the cellar.

So I lied.

I waited until the second Sunday night. We were at the kitchen table with the ledger open. I put my pencil down and said, “Norene, the plant is cutting us again.”

She looked up from her crossword.

“They’re going to thirty-two hours. Four days. It’s official after the first of the month.” I made myself keep looking at her. “My check is going to drop to about five hundred.”

They had cut us to thirty-eight. There was no memo about thirty-two. I made it up out of nothing in about ten seconds, with a pencil in my hand, to the woman I had slept next to for forty-two years.

She was quiet a minute. Then she set the crossword down and put her hand over mine.

“We’ll make do,” she said. “We always have.”

Then she did something I think about more than anything else in this story. She got up, took my good work shirts out of the closet, and ironed all five of them, though she had ironed them on Saturday. She stood at the board with her back to me until they were finished.

I sat there with the ledger and felt about as low as a man can feel and still be sitting upright.

Fifty-one Fridays

After that it was a routine, and a routine is a hard thing to feel guilty about for very long. That is its danger.

Every Friday, Loretta in the plant office handed out the paychecks at two o’clock in a window envelope, old-fashioned, the way old Mr. Rinehart had done it before he sold out. I tucked mine in my shirt, punched out, and drove to Broadway. My take-home was $700 and the envelope was $190, so I brought home $510. I had told Norene five hundred. That ten-dollar difference was the one slip in the whole system, and she never caught it, because she never asked.

I kept every receipt slip, folded in thirds, in the bottom tray of my old tackle box out in the garage, under the plastic worms, with a rubber band around the stack. I don’t know why. Maybe a man likes to be able to count what he has done.

I stopped buying coffee from the machine in the break room. I wore my boots until the toes showed a line of steel.

In June I sold the bass boat. Norene stood on the porch and watched the man hook the trailer up. “I thought you loved that boat.”

“It hasn’t been in the water since the strip pits froze two winters ago,” I said. “That’s the truth. It was sitting under a tarp.”

It brought $1,900, and I put every dollar into the weeks when the plant went dark for the Fourth and again over Labor Day, because those were weeks without a check, and I could not miss a Friday.

Then there was our anniversary.

It was a Saturday in June. Forty-two years. We were supposed to be in the air. I had the motel page in the drawer and I knew the exact balance of the can. I did not mention it. I waited for her to.

She came out to the kitchen at six in the morning in her robe, put the coffee on, and stood looking out at the garden with her arms crossed.

“I thought we might have meatloaf,” she said.

“Meatloaf sounds good.”

“With the good potatoes. I’ll light a candle.” She turned around, and she was smiling. “We’ll go next year, Rudy. The ocean’s not going anywhere.”

She was not sad about it. She said it light, like a woman crossing something off a list. If she had cried, I think I would have confessed right there on the linoleum. That was the worst of it. She was kind.

We ate meatloaf by candlelight. She put on the Platters record we got as a wedding gift and danced me once around the kitchen in my sock feet, and I held my wife and I did not tell her.