The Payment Book Beside the Pie

A hundred and forty-four stubs

The bank in Nappanee still sends out paper coupon books. A thin little paper book every year, twelve coupons and twelve stubs, one for every month.

You tear off the coupon and send it with your check, and you keep the stub for your records.

Our payment was nine hundred and twelve dollars a month. That covered the principal, the interest, the taxes and the homeowner’s insurance, all rolled together the way most people’s are.

It had been that same number, give or take a few dollars when the taxes went up, for as long as I paid it.

The first one I paid was December of 2014. I wrote the check at the kitchen table, and then I filled out the stub in blue ink: the date, the check number, the amount.

I don’t know why I was so careful. I just was.

Steve watched me do it. When I closed the book he said, “Thank you, Val,” very quietly. And he said it every month after that, every single month, for twelve years. Some months he said it at the table. Some months he said it in bed, in the dark, like a prayer.

His paycheck covered the government first. He set up a payment plan for the taxes and the penalty, and it took him almost four years to pay it off.

After that his check went to the lights, the gas, the groceries, his truck, and the insurance on both our cars.

Mine went to the roof. That was how we said it to each other, when we said it at all. “Your check, the lights. My check, the roof.” It became a kind of joke between us, the only kind we could make about it.

We stopped going out to eat much. We stopped talking about the Grand Canyon. I took on Saturday mornings at the hospital for three years, doing appeals.

Steve did side work fixing small engines in the garage, lawn mowers and snow blowers, cash in a coffee can.

And every year in January, when the new coupon book came, I took the stubs out of the old book and put a rubber band around them and tucked them inside the cover of the new one.

I could not tell you why. Maybe I just wanted to know I had done it.

By this Thanksgiving there were a hundred and forty-four of them. December 2014 through November 2026. Twelve years, twelve months each.

All in my handwriting, in blue ink, the same small, neat numbers I write all day at work.

The book lived in the top drawer of the buffet in the dining room, under the good tablecloth and the Christmas napkins.

It was not hidden, exactly. It was just put away, the way you put away anything that is too heavy to look at every day.