The Dollar on the Legion Bar

I sat with that for a while. Then I said, “Don’t tell anybody, Lenny.”

He looked at me then, over the top of his glasses, and I could see he did not understand. I am not sure I did either.

I only knew that I did not want Tammy caught by an old man’s word across a bar. If it was coming, I wanted it to come out of her.

“It’s yours to tell,” he said finally, and went back to his glasses.

That was the night before I caught her at the Kwik Trip pump.

So when she looked at the numbers on the pump instead of at me and said I didn’t put in that week, I already knew she was not telling the truth.

That was the worst part. Not the money, not even the pontoon. It was that my best friend could say something false to me with her whole chest and not once look me in the eye.

I drove home and sat in the truck in our driveway for close to an hour with the engine off.

The neighbor’s dog came over and leaned on my door and I didn’t even roll the window down to pet him. I was late for my shift. Lenny didn’t say a word about it.

Mike found me that night after my shift, sitting at our kitchen table with the light over the stove on and nothing else.

He had already eaten, cold ham out of the fridge, standing up. He sat down across from me in his socks and waited, which is the best thing about Mike. He knows how to wait.

I told him all of it. The Kwik Trip, the pump, the “you didn’t put in that week.” Then I told him what Lenny said about the wallet, and I watched his jaw get tight the way it does when somebody shorts him at the elevator scale.

“That’s enough,” Mike said. “Gerald’s nephew does law in Mankato. Wills and farm stuff, but he’d know who to call. I’ll call him tonight. Lenny saw it. Lenny would say so.”

“No,” I said.

“Deb, that’s seventeen thousand dollars.”

“I know what it is.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. Mike drives truck for the co-op, and has for twenty-two years.

He is not a man who likes trouble, and he is not a man who lets people walk over his family either. I could see both of those things fighting in him across the table.

“Then tell me why,” he said. “Tell me why not, and I’ll let it go.”

So I tried to tell him. There was no paper. There never was a paper.

Tammy’s name was on the back of that ticket, and in Minnesota the lottery pays whoever signs it. All we ever had was a handshake in a Buick and thirty years of Fridays.

And even if some lawyer could make something out of that, which I doubted, it would mean Lenny on a witness stand, and the whole town picking a side, and Tammy and me never in the same room again.

I would get my seventeen thousand dollars and lose the person who made toast for me the night my mother died.

“I’m not going to sue the woman who held my hand when Mom went,” I said. “I can’t, Mike. I won’t.”

He was quiet for a while. The furnace kicked on, that old grumble it makes, and we both looked at the floor register like it had said something.