The Photo I Slid in His Card

By The Coffee Urn

I went to the coffee urn because I needed something to do with my hands. They were shaking a little and I did not want Patsy to see.

I turned my back to the room and worked the spigot on that big urn, filling a foam cup I did not want.

I felt a hand close on my sleeve. I turned around and it was Nell.

She had my check in her fingers. The three thousand dollar one Merle had just held up to the whole hall.

She must have slipped it right back out of his pile while he worked the next card.

“I saw it,” she said. Low. Just for me. “The photo. I saw it over his shoulder, Wade.”

Her chin was up but her eyes were wet and hard at the very same time.

“I have known about that loader for ten years,” she said. “I know what my husband did. I know what he never paid you.”

“Nell,” I started.

She did not let me finish. She pressed the check back into my hand and closed my fingers over it with both of hers.

“You will not pay for one inch of this boat,” she said. “Not you. You have paid plenty already.”

“It’s your fiftieth,” I said. “I wanted to.”

“Fifty years I have let that man stand behind me,” she said. “Tonight, in front of God and the VFW, I am done letting him do it.”

“You keep your money,” she said. “You should have had the loader money too. And if I have anything to say about it, and I surely do, you will have it.”

Then she straightened my shirt collar like I was one of her own boys. And she walked back to the head table.

She sat down next to Merle. She put her hand through the crook of his arm.

And she did not let go of his arm the rest of that night. Not once.

Not when they cut the second round of cake. Not when the preacher stood and said a few kind words.

Not when the fiddle player started up and the old couples got up to shuffle on the hall floor.

She held onto her husband in front of every soul in that room, and she looked straight ahead.

Anybody who knew how to read a fifty year marriage could see that something had been settled at that table. Something that was not going to come unsettled.

The Parking Lot

We left a little after ten. The crickets were loud and the sky over the grain elevator was the color of a bruise going soft.

Merle walked us out to the truck. I did not expect that part. I did not want it, truthfully.

He stood in the gravel with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He could not quite look at me.

For a long moment none of us said anything at all. Just the crickets and the ping of a cooling engine somewhere.

“That loader,” he started. His voice came out rough, like gravel in a culvert. “Wade. I always meant to.”

“I know you meant to, Merle,” I said.

And the strange thing is, I did know it. I was not angry anymore. Somewhere in that hall the anger had set itself down.

A man can mean to do a thing for ten years and let his pride eat the meaning alive before he ever gets to it.