The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth
“That’s so sweet, Mr. Fenske,” my sister said. “But family should handle family. I’ve got it.”
“It protects you as much as anybody.”
“I’ve got it,” she said again, in her bright telephone voice, and patted his arm, and went to see about the coffee.
Gene was working the door. Twice that night the cash box got too full to shut, and twice he counted it down into a bank bag with Dennis watching, and wrote the figure on the back of a paper plate, because a paper plate was what he had. At eight o’clock he added in the coffee can.
Eight thousand two hundred and fourteen dollars.
Then Rhonda put the bank bag, the cash box and the coffee can in the back seat of her car and took them home, to count it properly, she said, at her own kitchen table.
She called me at ten that night. We were just coming back into Wahoo on Highway 92 with Cody asleep in the back seat.
“A little over eighty-two hundred,” she said. She was crying, and so was I. “Now don’t you worry about a thing. You don’t want that much cash in a house with a sick kid anyway. I’ll put it in at the bank Monday morning and write Children’s a check myself. That way there’s a record, and it doesn’t get nibbled at by your light bill.”
That Sunday she handed me the spiral notebook from the sign-in table, over the back of the pew.
“Here,” she said. “So you can do your thank-yous.”
One hundred and forty families had signed it.
When I got back in the car that day in May, Cody had saved me the last of the fries, cold, lined up on a napkin on the dash. He is a noticing kind of child. He always has been.
“That’s a nice pool,” he said. And then, a mile later, out by the elevator, in the same voice: “Did the supper money get lost?”
“It got held up, bud. I am working on it, and you are having your surgery on the seventeenth of June no matter what. That part is not in question. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I did not tell him where it was held up. He was twelve, with a surgery coming, and he loved his aunt. That was not a thing I was going to hand him to carry.
And I meant what I said about the date. Nobody turns a child away, the woman at Children’s had told me, but a scheduled surgery needs the family’s share, or a signed payment plan, on file. She could hold June 17 for twenty-one days. After that the slot went to another child, and Cody went to the next opening, which was in September. I had already decided that on day twenty I would sign the payment plan, a few hundred dollars a month for two years on a welder’s pay, before I let that date go. But 140 families had already paid that bill once, and my sister was skimming cottonwood off it.
Travis got home at six with his lunch box and the smell of the shop on him, that burnt-metal smell I have loved for nineteen years. I waited until Cody was in the shower, and I told him at the sink.