The Check I Framed Over Her Chair

I was not going to cash it. That part was never a question, not after the first three seconds.

The obvious thing was to call Emmett. I even had his name up on my phone. But he was in Alabama on a mutual aid crew after the tornadoes down there, and he had sent me a picture that morning of a line of poles snapped off like matchsticks across a cotton field.

He had been up since four. He would be up until dark. I could hear in my head exactly how his voice would go if I told him, and I could see him standing in a bucket forty feet up, thinking about his mother instead of the line in his hands.

So I did not call. Not that night.

The other obvious thing was to tear it up. Mail her the pieces, maybe. I thought about that one a long time on the drive home, along the back roads past the feed store and the dollar store and the little white church with the sign that said something about seeds and harvest.

But a torn check proves nothing. She could tell herself I tore it up because I was angry, or proud, or holding out for more. A torn check was just one more girl’s feelings in an envelope.

What I wanted was for her to know, every time she looked at it, that I had been offered a number and the number was not enough. Not fifty. Not anything.

And I did not want to make Emmett choose. Not two months before his wedding. Not with his mother, who had sat out in the cold in that driveway with him. I loved him too much to hand him that.

I kept the check in the zipper pocket of my purse for nine weeks. I carried it to the clinic. I carried it to the dress fitting. I carried it to the rehearsal dinner, where Delphine gave a toast and called me a lovely girl and did not look at me once while she said it.

We were married on the second Saturday in May at Emmett’s granddaddy’s place outside Culleoka, out by the barn, with folding chairs from the Methodist church and a sheet cake from the grocery store in Columbia.

Delphine wore navy. She smiled for every picture. She hugged me in the receiving line and whispered, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and to anybody watching it looked like the sweetest thing in the world.

Wendell hugged me after her. He did not say anything at all. He just patted my back twice, the way you would pat a good horse, and I decided right then that I liked him.

We went to Gatlinburg for four days because that was what we could afford. Emmett slept twelve hours the first night. I lay awake beside him and thought about the check in my purse in the corner of the cabin.

The Saturday after we got home, I drove to the store in Columbia and bought a little black picture frame, five by seven, for nine dollars.

I smoothed the check out under the glass. The fold line still showed down the middle. I did not mind that. I wanted it to look like what it was.