The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

What he told them

I rented two rooms above the hardware store on Main, with a radiator that banged at four in the morning. I kept going to church, the early service, same as always.

It was Jan Peterson from the alto section who told me.

She caught my arm by the coat rack after the service in late February and lowered her voice the way people do when they are about to hand you something heavy.

“Such a shame, Nicole,” she said. “Scott says you just packed a bag one day and left. He says he came in from chores and you were gone.”

I stood there with one arm in my coat. Everything in me wanted to say it back to her, loud enough for the whole narthex.

Instead I finished putting my coat on and buttoned it to the top.

“That’s not how it went, Jan,” I said. “But thank you for telling me. I know you meant it kindly.”

I didn’t argue in a church lobby. I didn’t argue anywhere.

A church is not a courtroom, and I was not going to stand in God’s front hall and fight about my marriage with a woman holding a casserole dish.

I sat in my car with the heater running and thought about calling Scott. I thought about how it would sound in town by Tuesday. I put the phone back in my purse.

Dad heard it too. Of course he did. In a town of thirteen hundred people, a story like that gets to the cafe before the coffee does.

He called me that night. Dad doesn’t like the phone, so when it rang at eight o’clock I thought something had happened to him.

“I heard what Scott is saying about you,” he said, without any hello at all.

“I know, Dad. Jan Peterson told me after church.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the clock over his sink, the same clock that has hung there since I was in diapers.

“Let a man show you who he is, Nicky,” Dad said finally. “Then give him the chance to fix it. Most of them do, if you give them room.”

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked him. I was sitting on the used couch in the dark with my shoes still on.

“Then you’ll know,” he said. “And so will everybody else, eventually. Truth’s a slow walker, but it gets there.”