The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

I was still sitting there, crying the way you cry when you have not done it in a long time, great ugly gulps, when the screen door banged at the front of the house.

“Jan?” It was Dale. “Sorry, sorry, Marcy’s car wouldn’t start and I had to run her over to the store. You get anywhere on the kitchen?”

He came into the doorway of the room with a coffee in each hand.

My brother is sixty-one years old, and thick through the middle, and he has worn the same gray Reds cap for so many years that the bill has gone to the shape of his thumb.

He took one look at me on the floor and the coffees went down on the counter.

“What happened? Jan. What’s wrong. Is it the house? Is it money?”

“It’s not anything,” I said. “It’s okay. Sit down. Come here and sit down.”

He sat on the floor next to me, which is a thing a sixty-one-year-old man should not do on a kitchen floor in a pair of work jeans, but he did it without a word.

I handed him the card. I did not say a thing. I let him read it himself.

Dale reads slowly. He always has, a finger under the line. He got to the teacher’s comment and stopped, and his lips moved over it.

“Waited in the hall,” he said.

“Turn it over.”

He turned it over. He read the pencil.

He read it again with his finger, one word at a time, and then the finger stopped, and my brother, who did not cry at our mother’s funeral and who held it together at Dad’s graveside with his jaw working like a man chewing leather, put the heel of his hand against one eye.

“He never told you,” Dale said.

“He never told me.”

“He had that in his wallet?”

“Behind his license. Since third grade.”

Dale shook his head slowly.

He looked down at the paper in his big hand, and I saw something change in his face, something like a man who has just figured out a puzzle he did not know he was working on.

“Janet,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to not be mad at me.”

“Okay.”

“I thought you knew.”

I stared at him.

“He used to take that out,” Dale said. “At the elevator. In the winter when they all sat around the coffee table at the co-op in Rockford, Verl Schmitmeyer and them, before the price boards came on.

Somebody would say their kid made the honor roll, or their granddaughter got into the nursing program. And Dad would reach in his pocket and say, ‘Let me show you what my Janet did.'”

He laughed a little, wetly.

“He’d read it to them. He’d read the whole thing out loud, the comment, in that flat voice. He’d got it memorized, I think, but he’d hold it up like he needed the light.

I must have heard it thirty times. I used to sit there and about die. I thought, here he goes again. I thought you’d begged him to stop.”

“I never knew that.”

“Well, you were busy. You had kids. You didn’t come to the elevator.” He wiped his face with his sleeve.