The Dollar on the Legion Bar

Mike came home for lunch and told me in the kitchen, standing by the sink with his cap in his hands.

He is not a man who carries gossip, so I knew he had thought about whether to tell me at all.

“She went up this morning,” he said. “Joanie said she took Rod’s sister with her.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Not you,” he said, and set his cap on the table and put both his hands on my shoulders for a second, and then went back to work, because there were trucks lined up at the elevator and it was harvest.

I did the math that afternoon at my kitchen table, the way I suppose anybody would.

On a fifty-thousand-dollar prize the lottery holds back twenty-four percent for federal tax and a little over seven percent for the state. Tammy would have driven home with something around thirty-four thousand dollars.

My half would have been about seventeen thousand. I wrote it on the back of an envelope from the electric company and then I tore the envelope up, because I felt ashamed of myself for writing it down at all.

I want to be honest about that. I would be lying if I said I never thought about the money.

Mike and I are fine, but fine in a town like ours means the truck is paid off and the furnace is not.

Seventeen thousand dollars is a new furnace and a roof and our daughter’s last year at Mankato State.

But the money was not what kept me awake. What kept me awake was a picture in my head of Tammy scratching that ticket alone at the bar, seeing what it was, and getting up and walking out without coming through the swinging door to find me. I was twenty feet away. I was right there.

On Wednesday there was a pontoon in her driveway. A brand new one, twenty-two feet, silver with a gray canopy, sitting on a trailer with the dealer’s tags still hanging off the rail.

Everybody in town drove past it at least once. I drove past it twice.

It came from the marine place outside Fairmont, the one that runs an end-of-season sale every October to clear the lot before the snow.

People said she put a big chunk down and financed the rest. People said a lot of things.

At the Legion that week, people asked me about it all day. They asked over their coffee and over their patty melts.

“You girls going out on the lake next summer?” said one of the card club ladies, smiling, and I said, “Maybe,” and topped off her cup and walked away.

Lenny was the only one who did not ask. Lenny is seventy years old and has tended bar at our Legion since Carter.

He was a Navy cook on a destroyer, and he still folds bar towels in thirds like they taught him. He sees everything and says about a tenth of it.

On Wednesday night, when I was rolling silverware at the end of the bar, he set a glass of ice water down next to me without my asking.

He wiped the counter in front of me even though it was clean.

“Your dollar was under her coaster,” he said, quietly, not looking up. “I saw you put it there.”

I stopped rolling. “Did she see it?”

Lenny was quiet for a long time, long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “She put it in her wallet, Deb. Before she bought the ticket. I watched her do it.”