The Photo I Slid in His Card

I spread the blanket on the concrete in front of the machine. Then I laid the broken pieces out on it, one at a time.

I laid them out the way they lay things at an estate sale. Neat. Spaced. So the light could find each one.

Everything that was left of seventy thousand dollars, arranged in rows on a moving blanket in the cold.

Then I stood back and I took one photograph. Just the one.

The caved cab. The pieces on the blanket. The whole quiet wreck of it in that yellow light.

I looked at it on my phone screen for a long time, standing there with my breath smoking. Then I went in to bed.

In the morning I drove to the drugstore in town and had it printed. A glossy four by six, the kind you would frame.

I bought a fiftieth anniversary card at the same counter. The heavy kind with the gold foil numbers on the front.

I signed it the way you sign a card for people you love, because I did love them, both of them, even then.

Happy Fiftieth, Merle and Nell. With all our love, Wade and Patsy.

I did not seal it at home. I slid the folded check inside the card and kept the photo loose in my shirt pocket beside it.

I wanted to look at it one more time before it left my hand. I wanted to be sure I had the nerve.

He would get his money and he would get the picture in the same breath, in his own hand, in front of his own people.

I did not tell one living soul what I was carrying. Not even Patsy. This part was mine to answer for, right or wrong.

The VFW Hall

They rented the VFW hall in the county seat for the party. Late summer, a Saturday evening.

It was the kind of Kansas evening where the heat finally lets go around seven and the crickets start up in the ditch along the gravel.

Somebody had strung a banner over the head table. It read 50 Years in big paper letters a granddaughter had cut out by hand.

There was a sheet cake from the grocery store, white with a sugar rose in each corner. And a coffee urn the size of a milk can going at the end of the folding tables.

About ninety people in their church clothes. Men in snap shirts, women in their good blouses, the little kids already under the tables.

Merle wore a bolo tie and a grin and worked the room like a man running for county commissioner.

He shook every hand twice. He told the one about the cottonwood like it was a good story and not the worst day of my year.