The Check I Framed Over Her Chair

When I set the coconut cake on the table, she stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“Where did you get this?”

“I made it,” I said. “Mr. Larrabee told me your mama used to.”

She looked at the cake a long time. Then she looked at the frame. Then she looked at me, and for the first time since the steakhouse, she held my eyes.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She ate two pieces.

That afternoon, while the men were out at the truck looking at something Emmett had done to the tailgate, she found me alone on the back porch with the dish towel.

“Take it down, Carly,” she said. She did not say it mean. She said it tired.

“No, ma’am.”

“You’ve made your point.”

“I don’t think I have,” I said. I folded the towel. I kept my voice low, because I did not want the men to hear, and because I did not want it to be a fight. “I don’t want your money, Mrs. Larrabee. I never did. I want you to know me.”

“I know you.”

“You know a girl who might have taken it.” I hung the towel over the porch rail. “I’ll take it down the day you do.”

She looked at me like she was trying to work out a sum. Then Wendell called her name from the yard, and she went down the porch steps without saying anything else.

The fourth Sunday, Wendell came early.

He was a quiet man, Emmett’s daddy. He had worked thirty-one years on the line at the auto plant in Spring Hill and retired with a bad shoulder and a garden and about a dozen cows on twenty acres his own father left him. He did not talk much at the table. Delphine talked enough for both of them.

He knocked on the screen door at eleven-thirty, by himself, in his church clothes, while Delphine was still visiting with somebody in the fellowship hall.

“Thought I’d bring the squash ahead,” he said. He set the sack on the counter. “And I wanted a cup of your coffee.”

I poured him one. He took it and walked over to the end of the table and stood under the frame with his reading glasses on, and he looked at it for a long time. I do not know what he was reading in it. There was not that much to read.

The date. Two months before the wedding. Her name. Mine. The amount. The memo line, which was blank.

“She never said anything to me about this,” he said finally.

“No, sir.”

“Thirty-six years.” He took a sip of the coffee. “She keeps her own checkbook. Always has. I never minded.”

He looked at me over his glasses for a while. I did not explain anything, and he did not ask me to. I believe he worked it out on his own, right there, standing under it with his coffee. He was not a man who needed things said twice.

When Delphine came in at noon, he was already sitting in his place. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and something passed between them that I was not part of.

He did not say a word about it all through supper. But every so often he looked up at the frame, and then over at his wife, and once I thought I saw the corner of his mouth move.