Anyway, I said, “Thank you, Lyman. I appreciate this.”
He went on dispensing and displaying his junk, his proof of travel. By the time he had finished Edith looked like a circus gypsy. She was weighted with cheap necklaces, purple scarves, earrings and dangling bracelets—all with city names on them. She gave him in return a hug and a kiss; they were having a fine time of it. Then she took him by the hand and led him around the walls of the living room to examine and explain each postcard he had sent her, and each one reminded him of something, recalled for him in droning detail the days and months he’d spent in each place. Edith was as attentive as a lover. She kept saying things like, “And this one you sent from Cleveland, didn’t you? What happend there?” And he would tell her of course; Lyman didn’t require much prompting. He was full of stories. I watched them from the rocking chair, feeling as out of place as an old maid aunt chaperoning at a kids’ party—they were having such a time.
When they had made the complete circuit of the postcards, Edith sat him down again on the couch behind his opened, emptied suitcases. “Now there’s something more I want to show you,” she said.
“Can’t we have some more pie first?”
“No, you can’t. Not yet. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
She went over to the bureau and brought back that shoe box of hers, the one with those damned unspent, unused, never-even-counted twenty-dollar bills wrapped in bows.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Yours. Ours now.”
“How come . . .”
He looked up at her from the couch, and she was staring down at him out of all those years. He didn’t know what to say. He rifled through the fussed-over bills, stacked them in piles, counted them out on the couch.
“That makes twenty-seven hundred dollars,” he said. “How come you never used it?”
“Because.”
“You never spent a one?”
“No.”
“Look here, Sandy,” he said. “She never spent my money.”
“I know it,” I said. “I’ve seen that box before.”
I stood up to leave then. Edith tried to keep me there for more dessert, but I was full. I was too full, for the moment, of everything.
They walked with me to the back porch door. From my pickup I looked back at them; they stood waving at me from the lighted doorway—a tall gaunt bald-headed man in a winter suit beside a trim little lady with shining brown eyes—two kids in their sixties with arms linked.
I went home. In the kitchen I poured myself a long shot of Jack Daniel’s without water or ice, threw it down, poured another and seated myself in the easy chair in front of the television to watch the ten-o’clock news and weather. Lyman was home and Edith was pleased. Bleary eyed, I watched Rusty Thompson, the Denver weather man, predict sun for tomorrow.