The Envelope I Carried Every Friday
Thirty-eight fives
She set it on the table in the light of the kitchen lamp. She pried off the plastic lid and turned the can over, and bills slid out across the oilcloth, soft, thirty-seven years of folding in them. Fives, mostly. Tens, a few twenties from good years.
She sat down and began to sort them into piles with her thumb, the way she counted lunch tickets at the cafeteria for twenty-nine years.
“What are you doing?”
“Tomorrow is the last one.” She didn’t look up. “A hundred and ninety. I’m doing the last one.”
“Norene, no. I have it. It’s already in my check.”
“I know you have it. I’m not asking.” She counted without hurry. “You carried fifty-one by yourself. You are not carrying the fifty-second. This is my Friday.”
“That’s your Oregon.”
“It’s my money, and I’m putting it where I want.” She slapped down a five. “And it’s got a good deal more than a hundred and ninety in it. Don’t you start.”
She counted thirty-eight fives. She squared them up and turned them in her hands and tapped the edges flat on the table. They were limp as cloth, soft from thirty-seven years of fingers. A few still smelled of coffee grounds.
She took a clean envelope out of the drawer under the phone book, where I’d kept the motel page, and put the thirty-eight fives inside.
“What number goes on the flap?”
I told her.
She wrote it in pencil in her round, careful school-lunch handwriting.
“Your check stays home tomorrow,” she said. “The whole check. First Friday in a year.”
I could not say anything.
She put the envelope in my lunch pail, on top of the foil, and shut the lid.
The last Friday
Friday was clear and cold. I carried the lunch pail to work and back and did not open it. At ten past four I was the third car in the lane at Crawford County State Bank.
Norene had asked to come. I said no, and she said, “Fine,” and then she came anyway, and she sat in the passenger seat with her purse in her lap and her good coat buttoned to the neck.
The drawer slid out. I set the envelope in it. Marcy drew it back through the glass.
She turned the envelope over and looked at the flap a good while. Then she slit it and counted the bills out on the counter one at a time. Thirty-eight. I watched her thumb them across the felt pad.
For the first time in fifty-two weeks Marcy Vukovich looked up. Her eyes went to me, and then past me, to the woman in the passenger seat.
“These have been in a can,” she said into the speaker.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They smell like coffee.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pressed her lips together, stamped something, and put it in the drawer. It came back with a slip folded in half. Third party payment, in the same gray type, and under it a second line in blue ink. Paid current. Extension complete. Letter goes out Tuesday.
“Thank you,” Marcy said, and I could not tell which of us she meant.
Norene reached across me and laid her hand flat on the drawer before it closed. She left it there a second, the way you would touch a casket. Then we drove home the long way, past the courthouse, with the radio off.