The Mason Jar by the Pie Case

“The Hendersons’ boy, the one back from Fort Riley,” somebody said from the back. “His folks sent a check.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“You weren’t supposed to,” Gunnar said. “Gail, there’s nobody in this room you haven’t carried a plate for. Every one of them did their own napkin. Nobody was giving you a thing. Everybody was paying a bill.”

“The Lions put in a thousand,” Norbert said. “The elevator co-op sent a check. A trucker from Wisconsin who ate here once heard it from Darlene and mailed two hundred dollars with a note that said his mother waited tables.”

In the pass window, Darlene had her face turned toward the grill. I could see her shoulders.

“Then why didn’t you just tell me?” I said. I could barely get it out.

Gunnar looked at me a long moment with his white head tipped, and for the first time in thirty years I saw him smile.

“Because you’d have said no,” he said. “The same way you said no to Ione’s pot roast. The same way you told your own husband no. You can’t hand a thing to a woman who’s spent her whole life on the giving side. You have to get it into her hand another way.”

“So you hid a jar behind the pie case.”

“It was in plain sight,” said Gunnar. “You put a dollar in it.”

Somebody in the back laughed, and then the whole room did, a short helpless sound, like a pressure valve. Ione laughed and cried at once. She carried the weeping for all of us that morning, so the rest of us would not have to.

“Your dollar’s in the count,” Norbert said. “Gunnar wouldn’t let us take it out. He said it would throw off the math.”

The envelope

Norbert came around the counter. He is a retired rural mail carrier, seventy-four, with a Lions pin on his collar, and he moved like a man delivering something he had waited a long time to deliver.

Every Friday, after I clocked out at two, he told me, he had unscrewed the lid, counted what was in there at the back table with Gunnar watching, and carried it to the bank. Forty-two checks and a great many ones. He put a bank envelope in my hand.

It was from the Glenrose State Bank. Inside was a cashier’s check, folded once. I opened it with my thumbnail.

It was made out to Gail Torvik. Not to the hospital. Not to a fund. To me.

That was Norbert’s doing. He told me later he sat up three nights on that point. A payment made to a hospital in a woman’s name is charity, he said, but a check made out to the woman herself is her wages, and what she does with her wages is nobody’s business but hers.

The amount was thirteen thousand, nine hundred and forty dollars.

I read it once. I read it again. I turned the check over to see if there was something on the back that would explain it, and there was only the bank’s stamp.

“That’s more than I owe.”

“That’s twelve four-eighty and then some,” said Norbert. “You’ll want something for the anesthesiologist. Those people send their own bill, separate.”

“I can’t take this.”

“Gail,” said Gunnar.

“I won’t. It’s too much. It’s every one of you.”