The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof
What I Found Under The Mattress
I let the quiet sit for a few hours, the way you let a room settle after a party, and then I went upstairs to strip the beds, because a stripped bed is a chore that gets easier the sooner you do it and harder the longer you let the sheets hold the shape of the last person who slept in them.
Winnie’s room first. Simple enough. Pillowcases, the light quilt, done.
Then Truman’s. I pulled the pillows and the heavier quilt off, and when I went to lift the corner of the mattress to work the fitted sheet loose, my hand caught on something wedged down in the gap between the mattress and the wooden frame. Something cold. Hard. Considerably heavier than I expected a boy’s hidden treasure to be.
I worked it free with both hands and sat down right there on the bare mattress, because whatever this was, it wanted sitting down for.
It was an old coffee tin. Rusted at the seam of the lid, the label long since worn past reading, the kind of tin that belonged to somebody’s grandfather a long time before it belonged to mine. I turned it over once in my hands, feeling the weight of it shift and settle, and something in my chest went very still, the way it does right before you understand something you are not yet ready to understand.
I pried the lid loose. Inside, coins. Rolled where they could be rolled, loose where they couldn’t, quarters and nickels and a great many crumpled ones, all of it smelling faintly of pocket lint and cut grass. Underneath the coins, a spiral notebook, its cover gone soft from being carried all summer in that canvas bag I had teased him about a dozen times without ever once asking to see inside.
The Notebook
I want to tell this part slowly, because it deserves to be told slowly, the way I read it.
The first page was dated the second week of June, only a few days after the roofing call I thought no one had overheard. In careful, determined handwriting, blue ink pressed hard enough to show through to the next page, Truman had written a heading across the top: Roof Money. Underneath, a running list.
Mowed the ditch line for the Hendersons, six dollars. Hauled feed sacks at the co op for tip money, four dollars. Nightcrawlers off the boat ramp, a quarter a dozen, worked out over three Saturdays to eleven dollars. Sold his own allowance back to himself, in his words, meaning he had simply stopped spending it, week after week, and added the whole sum to the tin instead of the gas station candy he usually bought on Fridays. Weeded Mrs. Colby’s tomato rows for two dollars and a plate of cookies, the cookies noted separately, underlined, as if they mattered every bit as much as the money.