What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress
The way he ate. Slowly, carefully, and then he would look at the bowl of potatoes and look at me and ask, “Is there enough for seconds?” Not, can I have seconds. Is there enough.
Lucy, on the porch one evening, telling a barn cat all about her life: “And Mommy sold the couch, and the big television, and Daddy’s boat.”
“Because of the kitchen,” Ben said quickly, from the step. “We’re getting new ones. Because of the kitchen.”
“That’s a lot of selling for a kitchen,” I said.
He picked at a scab on his knee and did not answer.
And the Sunday calls. Eleven minutes had become six.
“How’s the kitchen coming?”
“Slow.”
“Send me a picture. I want to see the cabinets.”
“It’s just a mess right now, Mom. Nothing to look at.”
“Is Missy cooking on a hot plate?”
“Something like that. Put Ben on.”
Ben would take the phone into the hall and stand with his back to me. He said “yes, sir” a great deal. One night I heard him say, low, “I didn’t. I won’t. I know.”
When he came back his face was closed up tight as a canning lid.
“Everything all right at home?”
“Yes, ma’am. Dad says the floor guys are behind.”
I gave Lucy two dollars at the Knox County Fair for a lemon shake-up. She came back to the bleachers without one and said the line was too long. Ben was standing right behind her with his hand in his pocket.
That went in the drawer too.
After the truck was gone that Saturday, I carried the cooler inside and put the chickens back in the freezer one at a time. I put the fifty in the sugar bowl. I washed three cereal bowls.
Then I went upstairs to strip the guest bed, because I am a person who does the next thing.
The room still smelled like children. Sunscreen and barn and that sweet, dusty smell of a boy’s hair. Lucy had left a cotton ball sheep on the windowsill. I stood and looked at it a while.
I pulled the quilt. I pulled the top sheet. I got my fingers under the corner of the fitted sheet on Ben’s side, the side by the window, and lifted the mattress to free it.
There was an envelope lying on the box spring.
It was one of my own envelopes, from the box in the desk downstairs, the long white kind I use for the electric bill. It was fat in the middle.
On the front, in pencil, pressed hard, it said “Grandma,” with a capital G he had made backwards first and then rubbed out and fixed. I could still see the ghost of the wrong one.
I sat down on the bare mattress.
Inside were dollar bills. All ones, flattened smooth, every one of them turned to face the same way. A boy had spent a long time on that.
I counted them out on the mattress ticking. Eighty-six.
Twenty-one trips to town at four dollars a trip is eighty-four. And two dollars at the fair for a lemon shake-up.
Every cone I thought I had bought those children was lying in front of me.
Folded around the money was a sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper, torn carefully along the holes. I unfolded it. He had written in pencil and gone over some of the words twice.