The Plate I Asked Her to Hang

The Place On The Square

There is a trophy and engraving shop on the square in town. It sits between the insurance man and the dime store that has been shuttered since I was in school.

They do little league trophies and retirement plaques and the small brass markers that go on the church pews when somebody passes on. I had driven past it a hundred times and never gone in.

I went in on my lunch. The man behind the counter had his reading glasses down his nose and a gospel station playing low on a radio by the register.

“What are we making today,” he said.

“A plate,” I said. “Brass. About so big.” I showed him with my hands, the size of a hymnal. “It is for a gift.”

“We do a lot of those. Retirements, anniversaries, memorials. What do you want it to say.”

I had it written out on a card in my purse. I slid it across the glass to him. He read it, and his eyebrows went up a little, and then he read it again, slower.

I watched him decide not to ask me a single question about it.

“That is all of it,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“That is all of it,” I said.

He nodded once and wrote it on his pad.

It cost me twenty-two dollars. I paid in cash and carried it out to the truck in a little paper sack.

I will tell you plain, it was the first thing I had held in two months that did not feel like a hole in the floor. It had a weight to it. It felt like the truth feels.

I was not going to scream. I was not going to cry in front of Donna and give her the satisfaction of calling me bitter to the whole family.

I was going to give her exactly what she had taken. In a form she could hang right by her door. With a smile and a ribbon, in front of everybody, on a Sunday.

The man engraved it just as I wrote it on the card. Our two names, Amber and Scott. Under that, the words For the Porch. Under that, the figure, five thousand two hundred dollars, and the season, spring.

It looked like the donor plaque on the new wing they put up at the county hospital. It looked like a thank-you a grateful family leaves behind. That was the whole trick of the thing.

There was not one angry word anywhere on it. Every word was true, and the truth, I was finding out, was the sharpest thing I owned.