Lars rose slowly from his chair. He is fifty seven years old, a big soft man, and he looked like someone who had been caught in a flood of cold water. Arlene turned to him with the check of Denise still on the tablecloth between them. “Lars, you cashed yours the Monday after Jolene and you went to Reno. You told her you never did. And in the spring of 1999, she found the canceled check in a drawer.” The room was silent. “It said, If you leave her. She thought you had sold her. Then she packed.”
Lars said he was young. He said he was broke, that he owed a man in Reno forty five hundred dollars, and that the check was a gift from his mother. He said he never meant to leave Jolene. He said it again and again in a voice like a boy. Arlene let him finish. Then she said, in a quieter tone, “I know that, Lars. I gave you the check, and you did what you did. But I wrote them, all three. If anyone sold Jolene, it was me.”
I looked at my husband. Erik had not moved. His hand lay over the check, flat, as if he were guarding it. His face was wet. I realized I had never in thirty years seen him cry, and I had seen him at the funeral of his father. Arlene was watching him too, with eyes I had never seen on her, soft and old and frightened. “Erik,” she said, “you told me that night you would keep it forever. I thought you were being cruel. You were being faithful.”
A check that is never cashed is a promise kept in plain sight, and a woman who writes one has already admitted the price of her own fear.
She asked if she could say something to me. I nodded. Arlene put both hands on the back of the chair and faced me, and she did not sigh before she said my name. “Denise, my own mother in law did the same to me in 1967. She offered my husband five thousand dollars to leave me. He took me to a justice of the peace instead. I swore I would never be her. And then I was, within the hour of meeting you.” She said it plainly, an old woman telling the truth. “I was jealous of how he looked at you.”
I could not answer her. I had waited thirty years for an apology, and now it was here, I found I did not know what to do with my hands. Erik did. He stood and went around the table and put his arms around his mother, and she shook against him like a leaf. The DJ turned off the music. Our sons, both grown, came to stand beside their father, one on each side, the way they used to flank him when they were little boys at the zoo.
Lars left the party that night, but not before Arlene asked him to call Jolene. She gave him the number on a slip of paper from her purse. She had kept it all those years. He said she would not take his call. Arlene said, “Then you will call until she does.” I do not know what became of it. I heard months later that they spoke for two hours on a Sunday afternoon, and that Jolene, now remarried with a house full of dogs, cried when she heard his voice.
When the guests were gone, Arlene stayed behind to stack chairs, which was not like her. I took the broom from the closet and swept the floor of the Elks hall. We worked side by side in the quiet. At last she said she did not expect me to forgive her. I said, “Arlene, I am not going to forgive you tonight. But I will have coffee with you on Thursday.” She smiled, a small, wavering smile, and for the first time I thought I could see the girl she had been in 1967.
Erik had the check framed. Not the copy of Arlene, but the one from the Bible of his grandmother. He hung it in the hallway of our house, next to a photograph of our wedding. People ask what it is, and he tells them it is the most expensive thing he ever refused to buy. The memo line is visible if you stand close. If you leave her. Underneath, in his steady engineer handwriting, he added a line in pen. Never.
In February, Arlene turned eighty three. I took her a pot roast and a cake with her name on it, spelled correctly. She sat at my kitchen table and told me stories about her own girlhood in Winona, the dances, the boy who sent her letters in the mail. I listened. We talked for three hours. When she left, she hugged me on the porch in the cold, and she said it again, softly, my name. Denise.
At our thirty first anniversary, there was no big party. Erik and I put on the wedding song, in the kitchen, and danced on the old linoleum with our socks sliding. Arlene was in the doorway, leaning against the frame with a cup of tea. She did not say a word. She only watched, her eyes wet, her shoulders loose. When the song ended, I held my hand out to her. She hesitated. Then she took it, and Erik took the other, and the three of us swayed there until the kettle whistled.
