The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

“You walk to the bathroom at night with a flashlight. With a broken wrist and two cracked ribs behind you.”

“It’s healed, mostly.” She took the flashlight out of my hand and set it back down, lined up just so with the edge of the table. “It’s not so bad. Your daddy and I camped for years.”

I went and stood in the hallway. There was a step down from the bedroom wing into the main hall, one single step, right outside her door. In the dark you could not see it at all.

I turned on the hall light and stood there looking at it.

Then I heard Tracy’s car in the drive, and I heard my mother say, from the front room, soft and quick, “Kim, honey, turn that off.”

I turned it off.

That is the part I am least proud of.

Now I have to tell you about Owen.

Owen was ten that summer. He is a quiet boy, more like his dad than me. He lines up his shoes. He reads the back of the cereal box all the way through. When he was little, his kindergarten teacher told us he was the only child she had ever had who noticed when she got a haircut.

I work the front desk at a dental office in town, and Jeff drives a truck for the grain elevator, and summers are always a scramble. That year Tracy offered to have Owen out at her place on Wednesdays. I let her, because it meant Mom had company one whole day a week, and because Owen loved his grandma the way some boys love a dog. Completely, and without talking about it.

On Wednesdays they played gin rummy and shelled peas. Tracy worked mornings at the bank and was gone till one. Those were the only hours all week, Mom told me later, that she turned the radio on.

The other thing Owen did that summer was mow.

He had two yards. Mr. Don and Miss Carol, an older couple on our street who went to Tracy’s church, and a widow lady two doors down. Ten dollars a yard, once a week, with our push mower that he could barely see over. He kept the money in a pickle jar on his dresser. He was saving for a bicycle he had picked out at the farm store, a blue one, one hundred and eighty-nine dollars. He had the price written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the jar.

Around the middle of July I noticed the jar.

I was putting away his socks. The jar had a few ones in it and some change. That was all.

I did the arithmetic standing there with the socks in my hand. Six weeks of mowing, two yards, twenty dollars a week. There should have been well over a hundred dollars in that jar, plus his birthday money from May.

“Bud,” I said at supper. “Where’s your bike money going?”

He kept his eyes on his green beans. “Nowhere.”

“It’s going somewhere. I’m not mad. I just want to know if you’re buying candy at the gas station or what.”

“I’m not buying candy.”

“Then what?”

“I changed my mind about the bike.” He moved a green bean from one side of his plate to the other. “I don’t really want it anymore.”

Jeff looked at me over the table and lifted one shoulder. Boys change their minds. I let it go.