The Envelope I Carried Every Friday
What the church heard
It was Leota Mowbray who made me saddest, and she never said a word to me.
She stood up one Sunday in November, at the part of the service where we share joys and concerns, and held on to the back of the pew in front of her. “I got a call from the bank,” she said. “They told me a friend of the church has been helping me with my house. I don’t know who. I am not going to ask. I only want to say it to whoever is listening, in this room or not. I am going to be able to stay home.”
Then she sat down.
Nobody moved. Pastor Ricketts, a heavy, quiet man with reading glasses on a cord, looked out over the congregation with his eyebrows up. Once, only once, his eyes passed over the pew where Norene and I were sitting. Then they moved on.
Norene reached forward and squeezed Leota’s shoulder from behind, and Leota patted her hand without turning around.
“I’d give anything to know who it was,” Norene whispered on the way out.
“Maybe the benevolence fund,” I said.
“It’s got six hundred dollars in it, Rudy. I’m the treasurer’s cousin.” She shook her head. “No. Somebody is doing a big thing. Somebody is doing it right.”
I held the door for her.
Forty minutes
What caught me in the end was the forty minutes.
The drive from the plant to the bank took ten minutes. The drive from the bank to Arma took fifteen. Add the lane and the drawer and I should have been home by a quarter to five, same as always. Instead I got home at twenty after five. Some Fridays I sat in the lot behind the hardware store for a while, because I could not make myself drive home.
The first time she asked, it was March.
“Traffic on Broadway,” I said.
Norene looked at me while she dried a plate. “Pittsburg doesn’t have traffic on Broadway, Rudy. Not since the Penney’s closed.”
“There was a train.”
“Mm-hm.”
She let it go. But I saw her watching the clock on the stove the next Friday, and the one after that. By June she was standing at the kitchen window at five o’clock with her arms crossed, watching the road for my truck. I saw her from the end of the lane, and I kept driving.
She stopped humming over the dishes. She started going to bed before me and lying with her face to the wall. Twice she said, “Are you feeling all right?” and I said I was fine.
For most of that summer my wife lay awake believing things about me that were worse than the truth, and I could have ended it with one sentence. I did not say the sentence. I was proud of how quietly I could keep it. That is not a thing to be proud of. I understand that now.