The Coffee Can at the Farm Gate
He turned and looked at me.
“I don’t care about setting Tammy straight first,” I said. “I care about setting them straight first. Nobody pays to come home to this place, not for one more hour. I’ll settle with Tammy myself, after the pie.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to give it back.”
“With what?”
“With mine.”
He knew what I meant. I have a savings account at the bank in Ord that is only in my name. Bob has never asked what is in it. It is three dollars a dozen for eggs and eighty-five dollars for a baby quilt, year after year, and that summer it stood at three thousand four hundred and some. I had been saving it up for a new kitchen range. Mine has had two dead burners since the winter before last.
“Carla, no. That comes out of the farm account.”
“It does not. She’ll make it right or she won’t. Either way those people are getting their money back from the hand that feeds them, and that is my hand.”
He picked up his cap and turned it around in his fingers.
“She’s my sister,” he said. “I ought to be the one.”
“You have two hogs to put on at three in the morning Saturday. Do that. I’ll be at the gate.”
He did not say yes and he did not say no. He said, “Let me sleep on it,” which with Bob means he is already most of the way there and needs to get the rest of the way by himself.
Friday morning I drove the nine miles into Ord with my passbook in my purse.
Kim was at the window. She has been a teller there since she got out of high school, and she has cashed my egg money in dimes and quarters more times than either of us could count.
I slid the withdrawal slip across.
She looked at the figure and then at me.
“Twenty-one fifty,” she said. “You want a cashier’s check, Carla?”
“Cash, please.”
“Hundreds all right?”
“No, ma’am. I need eighty-six twenties and eighty-six fives.”
Kim has good manners. She did not ask. While she counted, I looked at the balance she had written on my slip.
One thousand two hundred ninety-one dollars and sixty cents.
That was the stove, gone back three years.
I will be honest. I minded. I walked out of that bank with a fat envelope and a sour stomach.
At home I got my red coffee can down off the shelf in the mudroom. It is the three-pound size, and I have kept clothespins in it since Mark was a baby. I dumped the clothespins in a bread sack and wiped the can out with a dish towel.
Then I sat at the kitchen table and made up twenty-fives. A twenty folded around a five. Eighty-six of them. I stood them on end in the can like recipe cards.
Tammy called a little past four.
I was crimping the edge on the eleventh pie. I held the receiver against my shoulder.
“I’ve got the tables lined up from the church,” she said. “Jeff will bring them out in the morning. And I told everybody half past twelve sharp, so don’t let Bob dawdle on those hogs.”
“He never has yet.”
“Well. I’m only saying. I’ve got eighty-six coming, Carla. Eighty-six. I have been on the telephone since June. Nobody has any idea what it takes to put this thing together.”
I looked across the kitchen. The red can was sitting on top of the refrigerator with a plate over it.