The Night They Dumped My Boxes

I was the other kind of kid. I was the one who was told to be grateful, to not make waves, to help clean up after everybody else was excused from the table. My wins were treated like accusations. When I made honor roll, my father, Roy, would say something like, “Well, look at you, too good for the rest of us now.” He said it smiling, so that if you flinched he could tell you it was a joke and you were the one with the problem.

So I did what a lot of us do. I left. I went two hours down the interstate to the community college, then to the state school, and I got a degree in accounting because I was good with numbers and because numbers do not roll their eyes at you. And then I came back. Not to Elmore exactly, but to the county seat, forty minutes from my parents, close enough to come home for holidays and far enough to breathe.

I rented a room above the hardware store on Main Street, and I hung out a shingle that said Colvin Bookkeeping, and I started keeping the books for the kind of people I understood. Farmers. The feed store. The diner out on the highway. The fellow who ran the propane route. A dentist. Two churches. A trucking outfit with nine rigs and a shoebox of receipts.

I want you to understand that I built that from nothing. One client at a time. One tax season at a time. One night at a time at a desk under a bare bulb while everybody else in the county was asleep. In the early years my family thought it was cute. My mother, Donna, would introduce me at church as “our Meg, she does a little bookkeeping.” When it got bigger, when I had three people working for me and then six, when I bought the whole building and not just the room above the hardware store, cute turned into something else. It turned into “showing off.” It turned into “Meg thinks she’s better than us.” Same daughter, same work. The only thing that had changed was that I was doing well, and doing well was the one thing our family had never learned how to forgive.

The sale

Three weeks before that night in the rain, at 4:17 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, my phone buzzed on my desk and I looked down and saw the confirmation.

A regional firm out of the city had been after me for two years to buy Colvin Bookkeeping. They wanted my client list, my staff, my name, and my reputation in six counties where they had none. We had finally come to terms. The wire had cleared. The money was in my account, clean and legal and final.

One million, six hundred thousand dollars.

I sat in my office above the street where I had started, and I did not feel the way I thought I would feel. I did not feel like celebrating. I looked out the window at the grain elevator down the block and the pickup trucks nosed in along the curb, and the first person I wanted to tell was a woman who had been dead for eight years.

My grandmother. Ada Colvin. My father’s mother.

I will come back to her, because she is the whole spine of this story, but for now you only need to know that she was the one person in that family who ever looked at me like I was worth something in myself and not for what I could do for anybody. She had a farmhouse out on the Barrow Road, white with a deep front porch and a windbreak of birch trees she had planted as a young bride, and when I was little that porch was the only place on earth I ever felt like I belonged.

She died when I was in my twenties, before the business took off. And when she died, my mother handled everything, and my mother told us all that there had been nothing left. A little cash that went to the funeral. The pearls and the good china, which somehow ended up at Kayla’s. The farmhouse, we were told, had been mortgaged and tangled up and was being leased out to a tenant to keep the taxes paid, and it was too complicated for any of us to think about. I was grieving and I was broke and I believed her. You believe your mother. That is the whole trick of it.