The Envelope My Girl Carried to the Dugout

Clara went and sat down on the dugout bench, and Addie asked Gail to help her over, and Gail did.

Addie sat down next to Clara, and Clara pulled one end of the quilt across her own lap, so it was over both of them.

They sat there like that, the two of them, wrapped in a double wedding ring quilt in blue and yellow, with their shoulders touching, on a dugout bench in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon. They did not talk much. Every so often one of them laughed.

Gail came and stood next to me at the fence and we watched them through the chain-link. I could not say anything. Neither could she. After a while she put her arm through mine, and we just stood there.

“She’s going to be all right,” Gail said, finally. “They told us on Tuesday. The counts are coming up. She’s got four more rounds and then they think she’s done.”

I held onto her arm and said thank God, and I meant it. I said it in my head again in church the next morning, standing next to Burl for the opening hymn, and I meant it there too.

When I turned around to get my jacket from the bleachers, Tawny was standing at the bottom of them.

She had come down while I was not looking. She was waiting for me with her hands still in her coat pockets.

I walked over. I did not hurry. Burl had pulled into the lot by then, still in his work clothes and his feed cap, and I saw him stop by his truck and wait, giving us room, his arms folded on the hood.

Tawny’s eyes were red. She looked older than forty-one standing there in the bright sun. She looked like somebody who had been up all night, and I think she had.

“I can’t give you four eighty,” she said. “I don’t have it. I won’t have it all at once for a long time.”

“I know you don’t.”

“But I can give you twenty,” she said. “Every week. I worked it out. I can do twenty a week and still make my rent, if I’m careful, and I’m going to be careful now.”

She took her hand out of her pocket. There was a twenty-dollar bill in it, folded in half, soft like it had been in that pocket a while. She held it out to me.

I did not take it right away. I looked at her, and she looked back at me, and for once she did not look away. That mattered more to me than the twenty.

“Clara’s going to know,” I said. “I’m going to tell her every week. Not to shame you. So she knows that people make it right.”

“I want her to know,” Tawny said. “I’d rather she know I’m paying it back than think I just got away with it.”

I took the twenty. I put it in my jacket pocket. Then I put my arms around my sister-in-law, there at the bottom of the bleachers, and she put her face down on my shoulder and cried for real.

Burl came over then. He did not say anything to Tawny about the money.

He just put his big hand on the back of her neck, the way their father used to do to both of them when they were small, and left it there a minute.