I knew the check was real. I’ve done taxes for half the county around Carmi, Illinois, every spring since 1980, usually at my dining room table. There was a box of W-2s sitting there, and the check was in the bank papers. Two hundred dollars, made out to Mrs. Imelda Dunn. Her neat, loopy writing was on the front. Virgil’s signature, large and careful as always, was at the bottom.
On the memo line was one word: “Lessons.”
I read it again, looking for a clue the word didn’t give me. Lessons in what? Why was Virgil paying a woman I barely knew? He was seventy-five. We had been married fifty-five years. I could add up the money coming into and going out of our house, but I couldn’t make that check tell me what he was doing.
At breakfast the next morning, I watched him eat his eggs. He didn’t bring up the check. I didn’t ask about it.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing I can explain over breakfast.”
He looked at me, then went back to his plate. Before he left for the grain elevator, he kissed my head, the way he has every morning since 1971.
That kiss didn’t comfort me. It only made me wonder how long a person could act normal while keeping something from his wife.
I looked Imelda Dunn up in the phone book. She was eighty-one, a widow, and had taught first grade at the grade school for forty years. I put on my good coat and drove to her house. I told myself I was going to ask one simple question. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with the answer.
She opened the door wearing a cardigan, with a pencil behind her ear. She didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Mrs. Bauer,” she said. “I wondered when you’d come.”
“What is my husband paying you for, Mrs. Dunn?”
She held my gaze. “That’s his to tell you, honey. Not mine.”
“Then you know what it is.”
“I know enough to say it’s nothing that should frighten you.”
“I’m already frightened.”
“I know you are,” she said gently. “Go ask him.”
I wanted to press her. I also understood she was refusing to betray his confidence. So I thanked her and left without learning anything.
I sat in my car in the yard for an hour. If I made a fuss and word got around town, people might stop bringing me their taxes next spring. I could picture being the fool wife who chased her husband to a widow’s porch. That was a small, mean thought, but I had it anyway. I also wondered whether fifty-five good years should be enough reason to leave a question alone.
I drove in eventually and went on with the day. There was still work to do at the dining room table. I sorted papers, checked figures, and tried not to look at the bank stack. I didn’t mention Imelda when Virgil came home.
That night, he waited until he believed I was asleep. I heard the back door. This time I got out of bed, put on my robe and slippers, and followed him. I didn’t try to be quiet. At the machine shed, I pushed the door wide open.
Virgil jumped. The little book on the workbench slid to the floor. Letters covered the bench, spread out in front of him. My letters, written in my handwriting when I was eighteen, in blue envelopes with Army addresses. Beside them sat a shoebox I hadn’t seen in forty years.
“Virgil,” I said. “What on earth?”
He didn’t hide the letters. He sat down hard on his stool. His big hands were shaking. Those hands had pulled calves out in the snow.
“Sit down, Etta,” he said. “Please.”
I sat on the overturned bucket by the door. He picked up the little book and turned it over in his hands. It had a cartoon dog on the cover.
“Mrs. Dunn’s been helping me,” he said. “Twice a week, while you think I’m at the grain elevator.”
“Helping you with what?”
He kept looking at the book.
“I remember the name.”
“He read your letters to me out loud. Every one, in the barracks.”
I stared at him. “Why would Buck read your mail?”
Virgil picked up the top letter, the first one I’d ever sent him. He held it close to the light.
“Etta,” he said, “you wrote me forty-one letters when I was in the Army, and I never read one myself.”
For a second, I didn’t understand the sentence. Then I looked at the letters scattered across the bench.
“You couldn’t read them?”
“Not then.”
“Not at all?”
“Not enough to read what you wrote. Buck did it for me.”
I looked at the old envelope in his hands. “You let me think you were reading them.”
“I know.”
“You answered me.”
“I answered what I remembered. And what Buck told me.”
He said it quietly, without trying to defend it. That didn’t make it easy to hear.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He set the letter down. “I was ashamed. Then I thought I’d tell you later. By the time I came home, later had turned into years.”
“Fifty-five years?”
“I know how it sounds.”
I wanted him to say something that would make the lie smaller. He didn’t. He sat there among my letters and let it stay the size it was.
I looked at the little book. “And the check to Imelda?”
“Lessons.”
“I know what the memo says. I’m asking why you had to hide it.”
He rubbed his thumb along the book’s edge. “Because I didn’t want you to know I still couldn’t read them.”
“You could have told me you wanted lessons.”
“I should have.”
“Instead you told me you were checking heifers.”
“I didn’t want to explain it every night.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
I was still angry, but the fear I’d carried to Mrs. Dunn’s house changed shape. The check had made me imagine a woman taking part of our life away from me. Now I could see the other secret: Virgil had kept my letters all those years, but had never been able to read the words with his own eyes.
“You kept all of them?” I asked.
He nodded.
“All forty-one?”
“I think so. I haven’t counted them tonight.”
I looked down at the letters. I remembered writing them, but not every sentence. At eighteen, I had believed that sending a letter meant the person on the other end had read it. I hadn’t wondered who might be standing nearby, sounding out my words for him.
“Did Buck tell you everything I wrote?”
“He read them out loud. I don’t know if he told me everything afterward. I didn’t ask him to keep anything from me.”
That was the answer he could give. It didn’t fill in every old blank, and I didn’t ask him to pretend it did.
I looked again at the book. “How long have you been going to Imelda?”
“Three months.”
“And twice a week?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you ask me to help?”
“I wanted to learn it myself first.” He glanced at the letters. “I wanted to be able to read one without asking you to read it to me.”
I’d been so busy wondering what the check meant that I hadn’t thought to ask what the word “lessons” might cost a person to admit. That didn’t excuse the nightly lie. It did help me understand why he’d chosen Imelda, a retired teacher, instead of telling me.
“Did you think I’d laugh?”
“No.” He paused. “I thought you’d feel sorry for me. I didn’t want that either.”
I had no ready answer. I had never known this about my husband. I had also watched him kiss my head every morning while he kept it from me.
The next day, I went back to Imelda’s house with Virgil. I wanted him to say it in front of the person who had helped him, not leave me to wonder if I had misunderstood him in the shed. He carried the little dog book. I carried the letters we’d gathered back into the shoebox.
Imelda opened the door and looked from him to me.
“Come in,” she said.
Virgil stayed standing. “I told Etta.”
“I’m glad,” Imelda said.
“I should’ve told her before.”
“Yes,” she said. “You should have.”
He looked down at the book. “I’m not very good yet.”
“You’re learning,” she said. “That’s what lessons are for.”
I watched him turn to the first page. He didn’t rush. He worked through a line, stopped, and tried the next one. Imelda waited without filling in the words. When he got stuck, he looked at her.
“Take your time,” she said.
“I am.”
“I know.”
He tried again. The reading was slow, but it was his. At the end of the page he looked at me, not Imelda.
“I wanted to read one of your letters myself,” he said. “That’s all this was.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “You’ve been sneaking out and lying to me.”
He closed the book. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Imelda stood nearby, giving us room without pretending not to hear. I didn’t need her to take sides. I needed Virgil to understand that the secret had become part of the hurt.
“I’m not going to tell you there was nothing wrong,” I said. “You let me think there was another woman.”
“I know.”
“And you let me think you were checking animals we haven’t had in years.”
“I didn’t know how to start telling you.”
“You could have started with the truth.”
He looked at me. “I should have.”
That was as close as he came to an excuse. I didn’t make him say it twice.
I asked Imelda whether she would keep teaching him. She said she would, if Virgil wanted to continue. He said he did. We would pay her for the lessons; there was no need to hide a check or invent a trip to the grain elevator. It was a plain arrangement, but saying it aloud mattered.
On the drive home, neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “I thought you’d be angry.”
“I am angry.”
“I know.”
“I’m also glad you kept the letters.”
He nodded. “I wanted to know what you’d said.”
“You could have asked me.”
“I know that now.”
At home, I set the shoebox on the table with the tax papers. I did not know whether I would remember every letter or whether the words would sound to me as they had at eighteen. I did know they belonged to both of us, even if he had needed someone else to read them the first time.
Virgil stopped going out to the shed to hide his lessons. He kept studying with Imelda, and he stopped telling me he was checking heifers. I told him I would sit with him when he was ready to try one of the letters. I would not read it for him first.
The check had frightened me because I thought it meant he had found a life outside our marriage. The truth was that he had been trying, badly and alone, to reach something we had already shared. He had kept my letters for decades. Now he was learning to read them himself.
