The Photo I Slid in His Card

I heard him tell it to the Vander boys by the coffee urn, laughing, acting out the roll with his hands.

I stood near the door with a paper plate and ate cake I could not taste and let him have his story one more time.

The hall smelled like percolator coffee and Pine Sol and ninety people’s Sunday cologne all at once.

There were photographs taped up on a board by the guest book. Merle and Nell young, Nell in a homemade dress, both of them squinting in some long gone summer.

I looked at that young Nell a while. She had the same chin she has now. The chin that does not go down easy.

Nell sat at the head table in a soft blue blouse with her hair done up fresh from the beauty shop.

She looked tired and happy at the same time. The particular way of a woman who has been married fifty years to a hard man and is still, somehow, glad of it.

She caught my hand when I came through the door. She held it in both of hers and squeezed.

“I’m so glad you came, Wade,” she said. “You’ve always been good to my Patsy.”

I almost turned the whole truck around inside my chest right then. I almost reached in my pocket and threw the card in the trash can by the door.

Patsy wore a nice blouse too, cream colored, with her mother’s pearls. She stood beside me at the edge of the head table.

I had the envelope in my shirt pocket the whole time. It sat against my chest like a flat cold stone.

The Card

When the basket came around for the cards, I carried ours up to the head table myself to set it in.

I stopped there a second with the banner behind me and the cake and coffee cups on the cloth. I took the photo out of my pocket and held it in both hands.

I looked at it one more time. My loader in pieces on that gray blanket. My face must have gone still, because Patsy leaned in at my shoulder to see what I was looking at.

She saw it. The caved cab, the broken parts laid out in rows. She did not say one word. She just looked up at me, and then she gave the smallest nod.

I slid the photo back into the card behind the check, and I laid the card in the basket with all the others, and I went back to my place by the wall.

They opened the cards at the table after the cake was cut. It was Merle’s idea to read them out.

He read each one out loud for the whole room. He held the checks up like a man counting a collection plate on a good Sunday.