The Five Thousand a Month I Never Saw

I did not tell him it was all right, because it was not, and he would have known I was lying.

“No,” I said. “You should have come.”

He nodded. I think he was grateful for it.

“You asked me, though,” I said. “I’ve been sitting here remembering. You’d say, are you doing okay, Mom, have you got what you need. And I’d say I’m fine, honey, because I thought you were going under and I’d have chewed my own arm off before I added to it. So I had a hand in the quiet too.”

“You were lied to.”

“So were you. And we both believed it awful fast.”

He was quiet a long minute. Then he got up off the floor, a man of forty-one getting up like a man of seventy, and he took out his telephone.

“Get your checkbook.”

“Matthew.”

“Mom. Get it. I want the numbers off the bottom of a check, and I want to do this with you watching me do it, so that nobody on God’s earth ever stands between me and you again.”

I got the checkbook. He sat at my little table with his reading glasses on, which I had not known he needed, and he typed in those numbers one at a time and read each one back to me out loud. Then he turned the screen around and made me look at it.

It was more money than I had seen in one place since we sold the house.

“That’s not five thousand.”

“That’s what was left in the account I can get to tonight. The rest I’ll bring you as I get it, and it will all come, every dollar of the hundred and eighty, if I have to sell that lake lot with her standing on it.” He took his glasses off. “And five thousand on the first, starting next week. From my account to yours. I’ll show you every month if you want.”

“I don’t need showing.”

“I think I do.”

He looked better then. Men do, when they have fixed something with their hands. He put his phone away and squared his shoulders, and I knew just what was coming next, because he was his father’s son.

“All right,” he said. “Now. First thing tomorrow you call that store and you tell them you’re done. And you call the church. You are never bagging another sack of groceries or pushing another mop as long as you live. I mean it. That’s over as of tonight.”

“No,” I said.

He blinked at me.

“I’m on the schedule at six in the morning. Ronnie made it out two weeks ago, and he’s already short, because the Hendricks girl had her baby early. If I don’t show, it’s a nineteen-year-old on lane four by himself the day after Christmas.” I put the checkbook back in my purse. “I’ll give my two weeks tomorrow like a decent person, and I’ll work every day of it.”

“Mom, you have the money now. You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to. That’s the first time in four years I haven’t had to. I’d like to see how it feels.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

“And I’m not quitting the church.”

“You’re not scrubbing toilets at sixty-seven years old.”