The Towel I Kept for Orva

One Towel Short

I told Carla that night. I should have told her sooner. We left her parents’ supper at six, in the dark, and I drove out the county road with the radio off, and I said, “I need to tell you about my mother’s Bible.” And I told her everything, the Buick and the finger and the towel and the note. Carla sat with her hands in her lap and said nothing until we turned in at our lane. Then she said, “How long have you had it?”

I said, “Seven years and almost nine months.”

She said, “Dirk.”

I said, “I know.”

She went into the house ahead of me and into the bedroom, and she came out with the towel, and she took it to the ironing board in the kitchen and she ironed it, on low, with a damp cloth, folding it in thirds the way my mother had. She did not ask me. She did not say a word. She smoothed the blue chain stitch with her thumb at the hem, and she laid it in my hands. She said, “You’ll know when.”

I did not know on Monday. I ran anhydrous all day, because the soil had dropped below fifty, with the towel on the seat beside me in a paper sack, and at the end of the day I sat in the church lot with the engine off and looked at the kitchen window.

On Tuesday, the third of November, gray and still, I ran long straight lines across a quarter section south of town and heard not one word the radio said. At a quarter to five I put the rig in the shed, washed my hands at the shop sink for a long time, and took the paper sack off the seat.

It was full dark by half past five, the way it is that first week after the change. I turned down Maple Street at twenty past, with the sack on the seat, and parked at the curb in front of a small white house with the porch light on and a glider on the porch. I sat there with the engine ticking and thought about what a man says. I had spent forty-nine days looking for the right sentence, and there was only the one I had already said, and it was a lie.

I got out. I took off my cap and left it on the seat. I did not want a cap between me and that porch.

I took the towel out of the sack, and I held it against my chest in both hands, because that is how my mother had held it, in her Bible, for twenty-six years, and I walked up the path. The porch light was already on, and I stopped on the second step.

She was standing at the top of the steps in a gray cardigan with the sleeve pushed up, and I saw her look at my hands. I saw her eyes go to the color before the shape, and then to the shape, and then to the blue stitch at the hem. She did not say anything. I do not think she could.

“Orva,” I said, and my voice was not at all the voice I had used in the fellowship hall. “You’re one towel short.”

I went up the last two steps and I held it out to her in both hands, the way you would offer a loaf, and she took it.