It could not have been.

It is a receipt and it was always a receipt and he was right to say it was nothing when he threw it on her coffin.

But I have it in the drawer in the kitchen at Oak Street, with the mud still in the weave of the cloth along one corner, because I have tried four times to get it out and it will not come.

And on the first page, in pencil, above a blank line where a name should have been printed and never was, in the handwriting of a woman who worked thirty-one years of Thanksgiving double shifts and embroidered the dates her grandchildren were born onto a napkin she never showed anybody, it says:

Chloe — if you are reading this, do not let Richard take this to the bank without Arthur.

She was wrong about what the book was.

She was right about the two names.