The Check at the Graduation Party

“Twenty-five a week,” I said to Greg. I hadn’t planned to say anything else. “That’s how I started. Twenty-five a week, then fifty when you can. You’d be surprised what it turns into.”

“Twenty-five a week,” Greg said, and nodded, the way he nods at a load ticket. “I can do twenty-five a week.”

The party came back to life after that. Somebody turned up the music on the little speaker.

Abby’s friends dragged her off for more pictures. The neighbors went back to their beans and their arguments about the Guardians’ bullpen.

Kristen found me about an hour later, when the sun was low and I was scraping a roaster in the kitchen sink.

She stood in the doorway for a while before she said anything. I let her.

“That was a mean thing to do,” she said finally. But she said it quietly, and she didn’t sound like she believed it.

“It wasn’t meant mean,” I said. “It was meant to be over. I couldn’t stand Abby hearing us fight anymore. I didn’t know any other way to make it stop.”

Kristen came in and picked up a dish towel off the counter without asking, and started drying the serving spoons in the rack.

We stood there side by side at my sink for a minute without saying anything.

“I wasn’t really after Abby,” she said. “I want you to know that. I like Abby. I was after Tyler’s father, I think. I’ve been after him for six years and he’s in Kentucky and I can’t reach him. And you were right here.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been there. Not with a father in Kentucky. With seventeen dollars in checking.”

She laughed a little, wet. “Seventeen dollars.”

“For nine days. Eggs and saltines.”

“I’m sorry,” Kristen said. She set down a spoon. “For the calls. For March. I told myself I was being fair, and I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t by the second one. I just didn’t know how to back out of it.”

“You just did,” I said.

She dried the last of the spoons and hung the towel on the oven handle the way I do it, which I don’t think she noticed.

Then she asked, a little shyly, if I’d write down what I’d done at the beginning, the credit union, the twenty-five a week, how I kept from touching it.

So I did. I wrote it on the back of one of the leftover party invitations, everything I could think of, and she folded it in half and put it in her purse.

It’s in her wallet now, I think. I’ve never asked.

The last people left around nine. My sister took home the rest of the pork. Jeff and Kim came over and folded up their tables and stacked their chairs in the garage, and Kim hugged me in the driveway and said, “Well, that was a party,” and I said, “It was.”