The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

Word of what my son did at that offering got around town the way everything gets around a town this size, which is to say completely, and within a day. I did not tell people. I would not have. But Ida Renner had been sitting close enough to see the pig, and Ida cannot help herself, bless her, and by Wednesday the woman who runs the register at the Dollar General was asking me if that was my boy, the one with the piggy bank, and did I know what he’d started.

What Wendell Cutter did three weeks later is the part of this I still cannot think about without my throat closing.

He called me at home on a Thursday evening and asked, careful and a little gruff, the way Wendell asks anything, whether he could come by the house Saturday morning. I did not know why. I told him yes, of course, and did not think much more about it until his truck pulled into our drive right at nine, and he got out and walked around to the truck bed, and lifted out that green bicycle with the silver fenders, the one that had sat in his window for three years, the one Hollis used to press his face against the glass to look at on the walk home from school.