The Four Words I Wrote Every Time
When he called that next Sunday and asked what I had wanted, I told him I had only wanted to hear his voice.
So I did not try again. But I want to be honest about those four words, because they were not only a prayer.
Every dollar I sent went to an account with my son’s name on it. Every note I typed was sitting in a list he could open any time he thought to. He never did think to. His paycheck went straight to the bank, and a man working sixty hours a week does not scroll through his phone for fun. But it was there. I was not going to carry tales about his wife. I was just going to write down the truth, four words at a time, in the one place he would someday read it for himself.
After that I stopped texting to ask and simply waited for the Saturdays. I had sat down with my checkbook and worked out that two a month was what I could do.
I work four mornings a week at the register in the hardware store on Main. Fourteen dollars an hour. Fifty dollars is most of a morning on my feet, selling furnace filters and seed potatoes. I am the kind of fine where fifty dollars is a real number. I priced out my grandchildren like groceries. Two visits a month, one hundred dollars, and I quit buying the good coffee.
She had quit bringing them to church after Scott left. She looked tired that summer, and there was mail, I noticed, that stayed face down on the counter by the toaster from one visit to the next. But the requests came right on schedule.
Fourteen times, from the twenty-second of March to the twenty-seventh of September. Seven hundred dollars. Fourteen notes. I never changed a letter.
It was Mason who broke it open, and he started two weeks before anybody else knew.
The thirteenth of September was my thirteenth visit. The three of us had done a puzzle on the living room floor, a red barn in a hundred pieces, and Lily had gone down for her nap without a peep, which I noted, and which Tiffany noted me noting.
When I got up to go, Mason said he wanted to show me something in his room. He took my hand and pulled me down the hall. But he did not go in his room. He stopped by the linen closet, where his mother could not see us from the kitchen, and he dug in the pocket of his jeans.
He put a sandwich bag in my hand. The zipper kind. It was heavy.
Quarters. Dimes. Some nickels. One dollar bill folded to the size of a postage stamp.
“It’s three dollars and forty cents,” he whispered. “I counted it two times. It’s for Mom. So you can come Thursday too.”
“I know it’s not fifty,” he said. He was watching my face, worried he had done it wrong. “But I can get more. Mr. Halvorson gives me a quarter a bucket for picking up his crabapples.”
I got down on that hallway carpet, which at sixty-three is a decision, and I put my arms around him and held on. He smelled like pencil shavings and outdoors. He patted my back, two little pats, the way you would comfort somebody at a funeral.
He had turned seven in August. He had been saving up to buy his grandmother.
“Mason,” I said, when I could. “How do you know about the fifty?”