The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

What my father did

Dad looked at the envelope for a long time. Then he did something I had never seen him do at that table.

He opened it and counted it. Slowly, bill by bill, with his knotted fingers, while the whole cafe watched.

“Fifty-five hundred,” he said, when he was done. He set it down and squared the edges. “That’s right.”

Then he turned to me. “Nicky,” he said. “How much have you paid me, all told?”

“Five thousand,” I said. “Ten envelopes. Ten Sundays.”

“And eleven thousand was the loan,” Dad said. He wasn’t asking. He was doing it in his head, the way he used to figure the milk check at the kitchen table.

“So there’s five hundred left,” I said. I already knew it. I had known it since Scott said fifty-five hundred.

I took envelope number eleven out of my coat pocket. I slid it across the table to my father the way I had ten times before.

Eleven of twenty-two, it said on the inside of the flap. Except it wasn’t eleven of twenty-two anymore. It was the last one.

Dad reached for it, the same as always.

Then he reached down beside his chair and brought up his Bible. The big black one with the cracked spine that he has carried to church every Sunday since I was little.

I had seen it beside his chair all year and never thought a thing about it.

He opened it on the table. Tucked inside the front cover were ten white envelopes, flat and empty, every one of them with my pencil number on the flap.

One of twenty-two. Two of twenty-two. All the way through ten.

“I put the money in the bank every Monday,” Dad said. “But I kept the envelopes. Your mother kept every card you ever made her. I figured I’d do the same.”

I couldn’t say anything. I sat there with my hands in my lap and looked at my own handwriting, ten times over, in my father’s Bible.

Dad opened my eleventh envelope. He took out the twenty-five twenties. Then he folded the bills once and held them out to me across the table.

“This one’s yours,” he said, and held it there until I looked at him.

“Dad, no. That’s the last of it. That finishes it.”

“The loan was eleven thousand,” he said. “I’ve got ten thousand five hundred back. That’s plenty. I’m seventy-two years old, Nicky, and I’ve decided I’m forgiving the last five hundred dollars of a loan, and nobody at this table is going to argue with me about it.”