The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

I took each one of those Wells and I filed them in a drawer in my heart marked Not Enough. I did not know I was doing it.

I only knew that at fifty-eight years old, I could still count on one hand the times my father had said anything to me about how I was doing.

Here is how he died. It was the second Saturday in March, a gray morning with sleet on the wires.

Dale found him in the recliner when he went to bring over a bag of feed for the barn cats.

The television was on. The coffee in his cup was still a little warm.

The doctor at the hospital in Celina told us it was his heart and that it would have been fast, and that was the kindest thing anyone said to me all week.

We buried him from our parish on the Wednesday.

The funeral home on Main Street handled everything, and the Knights of Columbus came in their sashes, and the ladies of the altar society fed three hundred people in the basement.

I did the first reading.

I have been a lector at our church for twenty-six years, and I read the passage from Wisdom about the souls of the just being in the hand of God, and I did not miss a word.

I looked up once, at the end, out of habit. There is a spot on the aisle, the fourth pew from the back, where my father always sat.

The spot was empty because we had put the casket in front of it.

For twenty-six years he had sat in that spot every time I read. He never told me why.

He never told me he was listening. After Mass he would shake the priest’s hand, pat my arm, and say, “Carry on.”

I did not understand then that I was being given something. I thought it was a man being polite.

So that was the Saturday in April, and that was the wallet.

I opened it because I thought I should check for anything the bank or the funeral home might need. It was something to do with my hands.

There was twenty-three dollars in it, a ten and two fives and three ones, all of them soft.

There was his driver’s license, which he had renewed in January over my objections. There was a punch card from the feed store, one punch short of a free bag.

There was his Social Security card, gone nearly to cloth. A Mass card for my mother with her picture on it, and the dates, and the little prayer on the back.

There was a photograph of Dale and me from 1979, on the hood of the old Ford, squinting. I had a gap where my front tooth was supposed to be.

Behind the license, in the slot where a man keeps a thing he does not want to lose, there was a piece of paper folded in quarters.

It was thin as an onion skin.