The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

Grade 3. Mrs. O. Bruns.

My heart did something I can only describe as a stumble.

It was the card from the third quarter of the 1976 to 1977 school year.

It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the grades had faded to ghosts. But I could still read most of them.

Arithmetic, B. Spelling, A. Penmanship, B plus. Reading, B. And one line I had forgotten completely, a separate row near the bottom that said Oral Reading, and beside it, in Mrs.

Bruns’s careful cursive, a mark I had never seen before, a plain capital S with a star beside it.

Under the grades there was a box marked Teacher’s Comments. It was the only box on the card filled to the edges.

I read the first line, and the kitchen disappeared.

I should say that I do not remember my mother ever showing me that card. I do not remember the day it came home.

I know I brought it in my coat pocket, because everyone did, and I know my mother signed it at the table, and I know I never saw it again.

I had assumed it went in a drawer, along with all the others. I had assumed it went into the cedar chest in the spare room with my mother’s good tablecloth.

It had gone into my father’s back pocket. And it had stayed there, through more wallets than I could guess.

It outlasted the sows and my mother and the old truck. It outlasted a stent and two knee replacements.

Mrs. Bruns’s comments said this.

“Janet read her entire Valentine poem aloud to the class today, all sixteen lines, from the first word to the last without stopping.

She stood very straight. I have waited since September to write this sentence. Mr. Thobe, I believe you were right to wait in the hall.”

I read it once. I read it again. Then I put my other hand over my mouth, because a sound was coming up out of me that I did not recognize.

Mr. Thobe, I believe you were right to wait in the hall.

I could remember the Valentine party. I had not thought of it in forty-nine years, and it came back to me whole, the way a smell can bring back a whole house.

It was a Monday, February fourteenth, and the classroom smelled of paste and Hershey’s Kisses. We had made mailboxes out of shoe boxes and red construction paper. Mrs.

Bruns had picked a poem for me, sixteen lines on a purple mimeographed sheet, and she had told me the day before that I could read it or not, whichever I wanted.

I said I would read it. I do not know why.

I think I had been reading over a hammer mill for four months, and I had gotten used to the idea of my own voice being something I could throw.

I remembered standing at the front of the room with the sheet shaking in my hand.