I pulled the envelope from the box with careful hands. Each month, every department in the lab that beats the maximum daily capacity for work accomplished gets to pick from the box. It’s filled with envelopes containing gift certificates worth $25 or $50, and the rumor is that there are some cash prizes too. It has always been my custom to pull my absentee manager’s bonus before my own. He is rarely in attendance during the monthly meeting, when we are accosted with so many numbers that Pythagoras himself might have been tempted to heresy. This time my manager was actually there, but he let me pick for him, so as not to break tradition. I handed him his envelope, twiddling my fingers in anticipation of gaining my own prize. I reached in the box and yanked out an envelope as if I were hand-fishing, then receded into the crowd for the next-in-line.

“What did you get?” Jarrett posed the question.

I opened the envelope. To my great surprise, it was a $50 prize and not $25 like I usually get. Also, every other time it had been to Best Buy, but this time it was something else. Restoration Hardware was written on the slip.

“What the hell is that?”

“I dunno . . .” I said, “I guess I could get a skill saw or something.” I was not thrilled at having gotten in on what I perceived to be a glorified Home Depot. Seeing as how I don’t own my own home, I walked out downcast.

When I got to my lab, I logged on to the internet and checked out their web site. I was shocked to see that what I had actually received was a gift certificate to a glorified Pottery Barn. I have less use for what I saw on the web site then I do for a double-pronged gold-gilded ornate cocktail weenie fork.

So I have now a useless gift certificate and I wonder what can be done with it. It was just about this time that I received in the mail my official invitation to Brandon’s wedding. Alongside it was a power bill that had obviously been in the rain a few times before this crystal clear day. I turned the bill over and on the back was penned found in the box next door. I opened the bill and it was four months old. The wheels of cognition spun wildly in my brain. The first spark was a remembrance of that month long ago that I never received my power bill and was smacked with a thirty-cent fee on top of my nine-dollar bill the next month because of late payment. The next thought was, This is a Godsend. My attention turned to the wedding invitation and my receipt of a $50.00 freebee from Restoration Hardware. Such fare will synchronize perfectly with the other gifts at the wedding, being apt as it is to a new home of newlyweds. All I have to do is take the certificate out and put it in my own envelope. Voila, instant wedding gift, in style and at no cost to me.

The weeks passed. The wedding approached and the Human Resources Department had neglected to give me my award. The weekend of the wedding was approaching and I decided that if I didn’t have my gift in hand by Wednesday I would have to write an e-mail making some excuse for needing the thing right away. When Wednesday came I found myself in the lab sitting in front of my computer racking my brain to come up with an excuse for the needed promptness. After all, why would anyone have an emergency and need to go to Restoration Hardware? I was on the edge of despair, realizing that I might just have to explain that, yes, I am so cheap as to give my friend this certificate as a remembrance of me for his one and only wedding. As I clicked on the e-mail icon my salvation entered the door. Mary-Ann came in with the envelope. “Here’s your prize,” she said in an upbeat tone.

“Gravy!” I yelled, snatching the paper from her hand and kissing it.

“I wouldn’t have thought that you would be the kind to like Restoration Hardware,” she said in an inquisitive tone.

“I don’t really even know what they sell there.” I said.

“Well if you’re not going to use it, then give it to me. I love that place.”

“Oh, . . . I do intend to use it.” I said placing stress on the proper words so as to denote a double meaning. I left it at that and she exited puzzled and deterred from further inquiry. I believe I have cultivated a mystique over many long years in the lab.

I opened the envelope and, much to my surprise, it was an actual paper gift certificate, not a debit card like all of those Best Buy prizes I won. Much worse for me was the fact that written on it, I found my name and the reason for its granting, “For Analytical Excellence.” My face fell. How was this going to work as a wedding present?

“Beer!” The word came out in a dreamy way, as if spoken by a child who had too long stayed up the night before a trip fantasizing about it, and now on the actual morning, exclaimed its excitement through the drowsiness that resulted. It was the first word out of Rebecca’s mouth on the day of the wedding. To get this response I had awakened her with the loudly proclaimed line, “Today, I eat pork sausage.” We had stayed the night in Birmingham. After getting ready, we departed for Auburn and the wedding.

In booking the wedding, Brandon had simply called the hall and asked for the soonest dates they had. The response was that they only had two dates left for the summer, and that the next available was April 19th. He confirmed his wedding for that day and it was set. He never checked to see that the reason it was vacant was that it was Holy Saturday. His only luck after realizing this, was that his cousin is a minister and was willing to do the wedding on the day before the biggest day on the Christian calendar. I was a bit unnerved that I had to miss the vigil at my church to drive out to Auburn, but I decided to use Brandon’s wedding as the occasion to break my Lent-long fast from all animal flesh as did Rebecca for her abstinence from beer. I was very hesitant, because it is after the vigil that the fast should be broken, and only a sign from the divine would soothe my soul.

One disheartening thing about living in New Orleans is that there’s not a Waffle House in the city. Every interstate exit in the southeast has a Waffle House on each side of it, and having grown up with them, they are a missed commodity. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere–in particular, Alabama. We pulled into the Waffle House dressed in our wedding duds, I black pants and a dark blue shirt with, of course, black suspenders, Rebecca in a golden dress, which was very fifties in its style. We pushed the door open and passed the greeter who seemed to have no other job than to give quips to the passers by and gossip with the waitresses.

“Can we smoke over there?” Rebecca asked the lady.

“You can smoke anywhere hon, this is Waffle House.”

Music to the ears of someone recently transported from Fascist Portland. We walked in like a macabre duo, as out of place as if Gomez and Morticia had walked in themselves. All the clanking of the dishes stopped, and all heads turned. As I walked, I looked across and noticed one gawker in particular, in his sixties probably, his ball cap turned forward, riding high on his head. His coffee cup was stopped midway between table and chin as his head swiveled to mark our progress from door to table. Apparently people don’t often wear their Sunday best to this establishment.

I looked over the menu. I hadn’t been to a Waffle House in quite a long time and wanted to order all my old standbys, but I decided to keep it simple. One order of hashbrowns covered with cheese. I consulted the small dictionary on the laminated page to make sure I got my order right, because I always get covered and topped mixed up, and I didn’t want my hashbrowns to come out with heaping helpings of Bert’s Chili mimicking the Smokey Mountains on top. We sat and listened to the diner chatter while we waited for our food, little realizing a sign from the divine was to come at any moment.

The waitress came by with an order of eggs scrambled grits on the side. She placed the plate down in front of Rebecca. Order of hashbrowns topped.

And there it was, my reprieve from forty days of fleshless food. The Bert’s Chili smothering my hashbrowns had that smell that only freshly opened canned Chili can. In my zeal for the divine imprimatur so obviously granted, I almost ordered a Hamburger Plate on the side, but I relented and scarfed down my Chili topped hashbrowns with a consuming greed.

When we got to the wedding hall I went up the man of honor and made the small talk necessary, all the while keeping an eye out for the gift pile. My plan was to slip the envelope into the gift pile and wander off, explaining perhaps at a later date what “For Analytical Excellence” means. I could easily say that I had just written my name on there because I thought you wrote who it was from in that spot. But that line about analysis, what could that mean?

“You really picked a good wife, my friend!” I would have time to think of a better excuse before I talked it over with him on the phone.

I spotted the pile close to the door. This was good. I put a cigar in my mouth and walked toward the door patting myself down as if looking for a lighter. As I passed the pile I slid my hand into my back pocket where I believed the envelope to be, only to find a void. My mind jumped back to the hotel as I passed the gift pile, still patting my pockets, and glancing confusedly at the stack of neatly piled boxes all wrapped in white with pink bows. Though not a visual person, I could very clearly see the envelope sitting primly on top of my green military backpack, in the hotel room. I continued my patty-wack dance out the door where I stood alone, staring off the porch into the grass.

Later, at the reception, I informed Brandon that I had forgotten his gift at the hotel and I would give it to him at my earliest convenience. I figured the bride and groom would leave the wedding party and after returning home could run by Restoration Hardware and actually pick something up for them. I would be seeing Brandon in two weeks when he came to New Orleans. But plans were made to meet in a pizzeria after the reception for a round, and I couldn’t conveniently “forget” his gift a second time or it would be the subject of some speculation.

“I don’t want it as short as yours, but take most of it off.” I held the buzz clippers in my hand. The concert Brandon had come down to see this past weekend was to pale in comparison to the show that was about to take place in front of this small audience of friends. It was only his second full week of marriage and already he was off for the weekend without his wife. She had gone to another wedding and he had come down to New Orleans to see some music. So much for standing by one another’s side.

Brandon and his poor new wife hadn’t been too weirded out by my gift at the pizza shop. But if his wife didn’t hate me yet for my stinginess, she surely hates me now for what I did to his hair. Poor Brandon got it bad all the way around.

Literature