The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

Hollis started saving in April, the month after the funeral. He did chores for it. He picked up cans along the ditch on Coon Creek Road for the recycling money. He gave up the dollar I used to let him spend on candy after church, folded it into quarters, and dropped it in a plastic pig I bought him at the dollar store because he asked for something he could hear jingle when he shook it. Fourteen months of nickels and picked up pennies and birthday fives from his grandmother. Forty seven dollars and eighty five cents. He was nine dollars short of that bike, and everyone who has ever raised a boy that age knows nine dollars might as well be nine hundred when you are eight and proud and will not ask.

That is what he poured into the plate.

The McAllisters lost their house on a Tuesday night in early November, the same day of the week my husband died, which is not a detail I have been able to let go of easily. An electrical short in the wall behind their water heater, the fire marshal said later, the kind of thing nobody could have seen coming. Denny McAllister got his wife Sherry and their two kids out through the back porch in their pajamas and bare feet, and by the time the Bethel Grove volunteer department got the trucks out from town, the house Denny had grown up in, the house his own father built in 1961, was past saving. They stood in the Renners’ yard next door in November cold, watching it, with nothing on but what they’d slept in.

Cora McAllister is nine. She is the one child in this town who has never once treated my son like he was strange for staying quiet. They sit together at lunch most days, not talking much, which Cora seems to understand is its own kind of friendship. When the fire happened, Hollis did not cry in front of me, but I found him the next morning sitting on the porch steps in his coat before the sun was even up, holding that pig, shaking it like he was counting by ear.