The Five Thousand a Month I Never Saw

“Then I’m following you.”

“Matthew, it’s forty minutes.”

“I know how far it is,” he said, and his face came apart a little. “I looked it up in there on my phone. Just now. I had to look it up, Mom. I didn’t know how far it was to my own mother’s house.”

I buttoned my coat.

“Well,” I said. “Come on, then. Mind the stairs when we get there. The third one’s loose.”

He followed me the whole way. Down through Bixby and across on the Creek Turnpike and out old Route 66, with his big truck lights sitting steady in my mirror. There was hardly another car on the road. Every house we passed had its tree lit in the front window.

I parked in the alley behind the laundromat, in my spot by the dumpster. He pulled in behind me and got out and stood there in his good wool coat, looking up.

There is not much to look at. It is a brick wall with an iron staircase bolted to it and one yellow bulb at the top. In the daytime you can read where somebody painted the word Feed on the bricks a hundred years ago.

“This is it?”

“This is it.”

“You said downtown. You said handy to everything.”

“It is. The post office is right there. I can walk to church.”

He came up the stairs behind me with one hand on the rail. On the third step he felt it give, and he stopped and stood on it a second, rocking his weight, the way his father would have.

I let us in and turned on the lamp.

I keep a clean house. I will say that for myself. It is one room with a kitchen along the back wall and a bathroom you have to turn sideways in, but the floor is swept and the bed is made with my mother’s quilt, and I have Ray’s recliner by the window where I can see the courthouse clock.

Matt stood just inside the door. He did not seem to know where to put himself.

“It’s warm,” he said finally.

“That’s the dryers. They run them till ten, and the heat comes right up through the floor. I hardly pay anything for gas in the winter.” I hung up my coat. “Summer’s another story.”

He looked at the window unit. He looked at the box fan on top of the refrigerator. Then he looked at the calendar.

It hangs on the side of the refrigerator, the free one from the feed store, with a different tractor every month. I write my shifts in the squares in pencil, because Ronnie changes them. Six to two. Six to two. Seven to three. Church, in every Thursday square, and a little cross beside it so I can tell it from the others at a glance.

He put his finger on December. He ran it along the weeks.

“You haven’t had a day off since the ninth.”

“I had the Sunday.”

“You worked a half day that Sunday. It says so right here.”

“After church. That’s hardly work.”

He turned around, and that was when he saw the kitchen drawer. I had left it open an inch that morning, getting out the gas money, and you could see the tops of the envelopes standing up in a row.

I should have shut it. I was not quick enough.