The Check I Framed Over Her Chair

Something moved across her face then, quick, like a bird crossing a window. It was the first thing that afternoon that looked like a real feeling and not a sales pitch.

“Then you know why I’m sitting here,” she said.

I did know. Everybody in the family knew, though nobody said her name at the table. Three years before I met Emmett, he had been engaged to a girl named Kristen, and he had saved for four years to buy a piece of land out toward Santa Fe.

Nineteen thousand dollars. He worked every storm, every holiday, every overtime call the co-op offered. He kept it in a joint account because they were getting married and that is what you do.

One Friday in January, he came home from a double and the account had forty-one dollars in it. Her ring was on his kitchen counter, sitting on a note that said she was sorry and she needed a fresh start.

He told me the story once, early on, sitting on the tailgate of his truck. He told it flat, the way men tell things they have decided not to feel anymore. He said the money was not even the worst part. The worst part was that he had never seen it coming.

Delphine had seen it. That was what Wendell told me later. She had watched her boy sleep in his truck in their driveway for three nights because he could not stand to go back into his own house.

She had brought him plates of supper out to that truck. She had sat in the cold beside him and not said a word. And sometime that winter, she had made herself a promise.

“I liked her, too,” Delphine said now, across the steakhouse table. “That’s the thing. I liked her. I had her over for Easter. I taught her how to make my mother’s dressing.”

“I’m not her,” I said.

“Every one of you says that.” She tapped the check once with her nail. “Every one of you is somebody’s sweet girl until there’s money on the table. I’d just rather find out now, while it’s my money, and not his.”

I think that was when I understood she was not trying to be cruel. That made it worse, somehow. She believed it. She believed that every person had a price, and she had decided, out of love, to find out mine.

I picked up the check. I watched her shoulders drop a quarter of an inch, like she had been holding her breath and was disappointed to be right.

I folded it once and put it in the zipper pocket of my purse.

Then I took out my wallet, counted out fourteen dollars for my chicken salad and tea, added three for the tip, and set it on the table next to her plate.

“Thank you for lunch, Mrs. Larrabee,” I said. “I’ll see you Sunday.”

She was still looking at the money on the table when I walked out.

I sat in my car in that parking lot for twenty minutes with the air conditioner blowing and the radio off. Trucks went by on the interstate. My hands would not quit shaking.

I want to say I knew right away what I was going to do. I did not. What I knew was what I was not going to do.