What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress
I put my hand on the top of his head. His hair was warm.
“That was a hard thing to do, honey. All summer long.”
“It was your money.”
“It was a present.”
“Dad said…” He stopped.
“I know what Dad said. I read it.”
He turned around then. His chin was going.
“He’s going to be so mad I told. I’m not supposed to tell. He said you’d worry and you’d try to fix it and we don’t take…” He scrubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “I just didn’t want to steal from you.”
“You couldn’t steal from me if you emptied the house.”
He put his face in my knees, backpack and all, and I held on to him. I am not ashamed to say I cried on that porch in front of the whole street and the man with the lawn mower.
When he had quieted down I said, “What’s in the bag? You don’t have to show me.”
He unzipped it. A baseball trophy with the little gold batter snapped off and taped back on. A photograph of the four of them at a lake. A flashlight. A plastic sack of arrowheads, the very same ones, the ones from the coffee can. His father had given them to him.
“In case we didn’t go back to my room,” Ben said.
A nine-year-old boy had packed for losing his home, and carried it on his back to my supper table, and I had asked him if it was gold bars.
“Go on in now,” I said. “Tell your dad I’m still here. Don’t tell him anything else. That’s not your job. You’re all done having jobs today.”
He went in. I sat.
The streetlights were just starting to flicker when the screen door opened the third time.
Heavy steps. Not Missy’s.
I did not turn around.
“Mom.” My son’s voice was flat and tired. “What did he tell you?”
I held up the envelope, over my shoulder, without looking.
He took it. I heard the flap. I heard the paper unfold. Then I heard nothing at all for a long time, long enough for a moth to find the porch light.
When he finally came around and sat down, he sat on the far end of the step with four feet of concrete between us. He looked ten years older than he had that morning in my driveway. He had the note in one hand and the bills in the other.
“He wasn’t supposed to do this,” he said.
“He’s nine. He’s not supposed to do any of what he did this summer.”
“I never told him to give it back.”
“No. You just told him what it would mean if he kept it.”
His jaw worked. “You had no business driving up here.”
“Probably not.”
“I told Missy to tell you to go home.”
“She told me. I sat down.”
“For five hours.”
“Closer to six. Your step is harder than mine.”
He did not smile. I had not expected him to.
“So now you know,” he said. “The plant cut second shift in April. Eleven years, and they gave us two weeks and a handshake. I’ve put in at forty places. The house closes on the twelfth. We’re moving into Brenda’s basement till I find something.” Brenda is Missy’s sister. She has three boys and one bathroom. “It’s handled. It’s not good, but it’s handled, and I handled it, and I didn’t need my mother finding out from a note under a mattress.”