The Card of Thanks in the County Paper

Wednesday

The paper came out the following Wednesday, June twenty-fourth. Our copy comes in the mail, so it was in the box when I got home from the barns, a little after six, with the sun still high.

Abby was already home. School had let out for the summer three weeks before our wedding, and she had spent the day painting the bathroom.

She had changed into a clean white T-shirt and let her long dark hair hang loose.

I sat down at the kitchen table in my gray hoodie, the one I wear in the barn office because the air conditioning in there is set for pigs, not people.

I had the last two checks to write, the bakery and the nail salon, because the money from savings had finally cleared.

Abby opened the paper on the table beside me and found it on page nine, between a card of thanks for the Sheldon ambulance crew and an ad for a farm auction. She leaned over my shoulder and put her finger on it.

“There it is,” she said quietly.

There it was. Our wedding photo hung on the wall behind her, the one of the two of us under the elm tree by the fairgrounds hall, and the June light from the window was right across it.

I finished writing the check to the nail salon and tore it out.

I read the notice twice. It looked smaller in print than it had on the back of the folio.

Eleven thank yous in a narrow column of type, the same size as the ambulance crew and the auction ad. You could have missed it.

Nobody in our county missed it.

Thursday

By seven-thirty Thursday morning, the guys at the barn had read it. Our feed rep had read it.

Somebody had taken a picture of the column on a phone, and it went around faster than the paper.

Nobody said much to me directly. That is the way it works here.

My assistant, a quiet kid named Jeff who is twenty-two and works harder than anybody I know, came into the barn office around nine with two coffees from Casey’s and set one in front of me.

“My mom read your card of thanks out loud at breakfast,” he said. “Twice.”

“Yeah?”

“She said she’d never read a thank you note that made her so mad.” He thought about it. “Not at you.”

Lori, the hairdresser in Sioux City, had clients from our county. The dressmaker in Orange City went to church with half of the women in Sherri’s office.

By noon, I heard later, Sherri had left work early. One of the women at the treasurer’s office had taped the column up in the break room.

Someone took it down within the hour, but it did not matter by then.

I felt two things all day, and I will tell you both.

I felt a kind of tired relief, like I had set down a sack of feed I had been carrying for two weeks.

And I felt sick. Because I kept seeing Sherri in the top row of the bleachers with her seat cushion, yelling my name.

I came home that night and Abby had made sloppy joes. We ate them on the porch.

Neither of us said much. Around eight-thirty, the phone in my pocket buzzed, and when I looked at it, it said Dad.

My father does not call after eight. If he calls after eight, somebody is in the hospital.

I stood up and walked out into the yard to answer it.