The Widow Across the Gravel Road

The baggie of quarters

It was the second week when Arlene told me.

She waited until the boys were in the yard. Owen was teaching Sam to throw a ball against the side of the corn crib. Arlene had a sandwich bag on the table in front of her, the zipper kind, with coins in it.

“Owen gave me this,” she said. “Tuesday night, after his prayers. He said it was for him and Sam.”

I picked it up. It was quarters and dimes, and two crumpled one-dollar bills from the tooth fairy. I knew those bills. I had put them under his pillow myself.

“He said he knows you have to pay to stay at people’s houses,” Arlene said. “He said he didn’t want you to have to pay for him this time.”

I could not say anything. I held that baggie and I could not get one word out.

Arlene reached across the table and opened the bag. She took out one quarter, just one, and put it in her cardigan pocket.

“I told him that’s my fee,” she said. “One quarter. For the whole year. Paid in full.”

Then she zipped the bag back up and slid it across to me. “You put the rest back in his bank. Don’t tell him I gave it back. Tell him I spent it on cat food.”

Sunday

My mother found out on a Sunday in July.

She drove out after church with a pan of scotcheroos, which she does sometimes when Travis is home. Travis was not home. He was somewhere in Nebraska with a load of frozen pizzas.

The boys were not at our place. They were across the road on Arlene’s porch, because Arlene had asked them to help her shell peas, and Sam had decided shelling peas was the most important job in the world.

Mom got out of her car in our driveway and stood there holding the pan. Owen saw her first. He stood up on Arlene’s porch and waved with both arms.

“Grandma! Grandma, we’re over here!”

Sam waved too. He had a pea pod in each hand.

Mom walked to the end of our lane. I came out the front door and stood beside her. The boys came running across the road, and I said “Look both ways,” the way I always do, though nothing comes down that road on a Sunday but the Schmitt boys’ pickup.

Owen threw his arms around Mom’s middle. “Grandma, we stay at Mrs. Voss’s now when Mom works. She has a cat with one ear named Gus. Sam feeds him.”

“I feed all of them,” Sam said.

“That’s nice, honey,” Mom said.

“And she taught me rummy,” Owen said. “I beat her two times. And she doesn’t charge us.”

Mom went very still. I watched her face and I saw the words land. She did not look at Owen. She looked at me.

I had not told him to say it. I want that understood. I had never once said a word about money to my boys after that morning on the shoulder of the blacktop. But he was seven, and he did not miss anything, and somewhere in his head he had kept his own notepad.

“Owen,” I said gently. “Why don’t you take Grandma’s bars in and put them on the counter.”

He did. Sam followed him.

Mom stood there. Across the road, Arlene lifted one hand from her porch, not a wave exactly, just a hand.

“I have to go,” Mom said.

She did not stay for coffee. She left the scotcheroos. She backed out of our lane slower than I had ever seen her drive.