The Night I Drove Three Hours for My Kids

The Furnace Money

I didn’t wait for morning.

People ask me that too. Why didn’t you sleep in the tent and pack up at daylight? The honest answer is that Tom was home alone with a broken leg, and he couldn’t get to the bathroom without somebody holding him up. And the other honest answer is that I didn’t want my kids to wake up on that bluff.

I wanted them to wake up in their own beds.

Howard helped me take the tent down. He held the flashlight in his teeth and pulled stakes, and I rolled the fly and stuffed everything in the bag any old way. Josh carried the sleeping bags to the van. Ellie fell asleep sitting up on the bench, still wrapped in Ruthie’s blanket.

“Keep that,” Ruthie said, when I tried to unwrap her. “Bring it back next summer. That’s an order.”

When the van was loaded, I sat down at the picnic table under the lantern and took my checkbook out of my purse.

I want to explain about this money, because people have strong opinions about it.

We had a little over $2,600 in savings. It was the furnace money. Our furnace is twenty-two years old, and the man who services it told us last fall that it had one more winter in it if we were lucky and none if we weren’t. We had been putting away a little every paycheck since. Even after Tom got hurt, we hadn’t touched it.

The debt was real. Tom owed it, and Tom had meant to pay it. I just did not want to owe that man one more day, so I wrote a check to Darrell for $2,000. I wrote “Paid in full” on the memo line. I signed it, tore it out, and folded it in half.

Then I turned over one of the campground maps Ruthie had on the table, the kind with all the loops and site numbers printed on it, and on the blank back I wrote three words in my best bus-driver print.

Paid. Don’t come back.

Ruthie was watching me. She didn’t say anything. Howard found an envelope in the golf cart, an old one from a firewood receipt book, and handed it to me without a word.

I am not a hard woman. I want you to know that. I bake for funerals. I drive the same route every school year and I know the name of every kid who gets on my bus, and their dogs’ names too, mostly.

But I sat at that picnic table, and I thought about Ellie walking down that dark road in flip-flops, and I thought, this man will never again be able to say we owe him anything. Not one dollar. Whatever he is to us after tonight, it won’t be because of money.

“You’re sure about that?” Howard asked quietly, nodding at the note. It wasn’t a challenge. He just wanted to know.

“No,” I said. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

He nodded like that was a perfectly good answer. I suppose for a man who carried mail for thirty-one years, it was.

I hugged them both before I left. Ruthie held onto me a long time. She smelled like woodsmoke and Jergens lotion, like my grandmother used to.

“You come back,” she said into my ear. “You hear me? Don’t let this be what that place is to them. You bring them back.”

I said I would. I didn’t know yet whether I meant it.