The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

The creases had gone white and furry, and in one corner a hole had worn through where the folds crossed, so you could see the light of the kitchen window through it.

I took it out with two fingers, the way you pick up a moth.

That was when my legs went, and I slid down the oven door to the linoleum, and I sat there with the wallet in one hand and that folded paper in the other.

I could hear the clock over the stove, which my mother bought at a church rummage sale in 1974 and which has never once kept good time.

I did not open it right away. I want you to know that.

I sat with it a long time, because I thought I knew everything my father had ever carried for me, and I had a feeling I was about to find out I was wrong.

I will tell you what was in it, but I have to tell you the rest first, because the thing in that paper does not mean anything unless you know what I was like at eight years old.

When I was in the third grade, I could not say my own name.

That is not quite right. I could say it at home. I could say it to the dog, to the hogs, to my mother’s back while she stood at the sink.

But at school, in front of other children, a sound would stick in my throat like a swallowed dry biscuit, and I would stand there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it.

Jan-Jan-Jan. That was what they called me. Not all of them, and not cruelly at first, just the way children name a thing they have noticed. Janet-Janet-Janet. Jan-Jan.

By October of third grade, it had been shortened to Jan-Jan, and then I stopped raising my hand.

My teacher was Mrs. Ottilie Bruns. She was a tall, narrow woman with a gray bun and a gold cross on a chain, and she had taught in that building since before my mother was in school.

She wore the same navy cardigan every day of the school year. I remember it had a button missing at the cuff.

She was the first adult who figured out what I was doing.

In the first weeks, when it was reading time and each child stood and read a paragraph out loud, she called on the row in front of me and the row behind me and never on me.

At first I thought I had gotten away with something.

By October I understood that she had noticed, and that she was being kind, and that being skipped over was a kind of kindness that felt exactly like being left out.

I did not tell my parents. I was eight. I believed that if nobody said it out loud, it was not true.

But Mrs. Bruns called my mother. I know that now. I did not know it then.

Here is the part I remember. It was a Thursday in late October, and my father had come in from the field early, because a front was coming and the beans were out.