The First Envelope
The first envelope went across that table in March.
Twenties. Twenty-five of them. Counted twice at my kitchen counter that morning before church, under the one bulb that works in my kitchen, with the radiator banging and the snow coming down sideways outside the window.
I put them in a plain white envelope. I licked it shut. I wrote one word on the front in ballpoint pen.
Dad.
The Main Street Café in Fergus Ridge, Minnesota, opens at six every morning and closes at two in the afternoon. On Sundays it fills up twice. Once before the early service at Trinity Lutheran, and once after.
Dad’s coffee group has had the same table since 1987. The round one in the back, by the window, under the mounted walleye that Orv caught on Otter Tail Lake and swears weighed eleven pounds.
Four chairs. Dad. Orv. Leon. Pete. The same four men, every Sunday after the early service, for thirty-seven years. They drink coffee out of the café’s thick white mugs and argue about the Vikings and the price of beans and whose knee is worse.
I’d never once sat at that table. Not in my whole life. It was the men’s table. Everybody in Fergus Ridge knew that.
That first Sunday in March, I walked over after the early service and pulled a chair from the next table.
The talking stopped. Four old men looked up at me.
“Nicky,” Dad said. Surprised. “Something wrong?”
“No, Dad.”
I took the envelope out of my coat pocket. I slid it across the table to him. Past the sugar dispenser and the little metal pitcher of cream.
Dad looked at it. He looked at me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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