I worked it loose, and I had to sit down right there at the kitchen table, because it was a stack of savings bonds, twenty-eight of them, pressed flat as cardboard, and every one of them had my name typed on the face.
Series EE, fifty dollars each, and the dates are the thing. One bought every year in the week of our anniversary, going back to 1998.
Nineteen ninety-eight was the year we lost the house on Ferry Street. Roy had been laid off from the mine nine months and we moved into his mother’s back bedroom with two kids and I cried in a Kroger parking lot over a thirty-dollar grocery bill, and I told him that year, in that bedroom, that I never wanted to be a woman with nothing in her own name again.
I said that one time. In 1998. He never answered me and I never brought it up again.
He bought the first one that October at the credit union in Grundy and he bought one every October for twenty-eight years and never said a word about a single one of them.
They are all in my name alone. Not ours. Mine.
With them, folded in the lining, was a piece of paper from the credit union with a woman’s handwriting on it explaining how to cash them and what the penalty is if you go early, and Roy had underlined the part about them earning for thirty years.
And his note, on shop paper, in that blocky hand.
Dixie — you said in 1998 you never wanted to be a woman with nothing in her own name. I couldn’t fix that year. This is me fixing it fifty dollars at a time where you couldn’t spend it on the kids, which you would have, don’t argue. Two more years and they’re done earning. Hang onto it. One day it’ll matter more than you think. — Roy
Don’t argue. He knew me down to the ground.
I set that wallet in a drawer and let him see the disappointment on my face over a couple dollars of leather, and two weeks later his heart went at that workbench and I could not get to him in time.
The wallet sat in my nightstand for eleven months with twenty-eight years of that man’s Octobers stitched inside it.
I took them to the credit union in April in a shoebox and the young teller had to go get somebody, and then the somebody had to go get the manager, and the three of them counted them twice. It is more money than I have ever had at one time in my life and it is not a fortune and it does not matter what the number is.
I have not cashed them. Two more years and they’re done earning, and I intend to do exactly what that man told me to do, which is what I did not do the first time.
I carry the wallet. The stitches are uneven and my initials are burned crooked and I would not trade it for anything in a jewelry store in this state.