The Sack Breakfast in the Bread Box

“Made it before the whistle.”

“Passed my chem test. 84.”

“Grandpa had a good night. Slept till 4.”

“Sorry I dropped the apple in the road. Ate it anyway.”

“Mill gave me Saturdays too. Thank you for the extra.”

“Happy birthday Mrs. Lindgren. My grandpa says so too.”

There were hundreds of them. Jen had pressed them between the pages from Genesis clear through Revelation, a few in every book, like a woman pressing flowers. Two years of mornings, a line for every one.

I found the one from the first week, in the front of Genesis. It just said, “Thank you ma’am. I will pay you back.” Under it, in Jen’s hand, she had written in pen: “No you will not.”

I sat on our bed holding a Bible full of a boy’s thank yous, and I thought about every Sunday dinner where I had passed the potatoes and agreed with my mother.

I did not take the Bible to Jen that night. I told her I could not find it. That was a lie, and I am not proud of it, but I could not hand her that book and look at her the same.

Instead, I went down to the kitchen and opened the drawer by the stove and took out her little green egg book.

I had never once looked inside it. It was hers, and it was eggs, and I was a man who teased her about it.

Every sale was in there, in her round church-secretary hand. Dozens to Marlys Johnson, dozens to the Petersons, two dozen for the Lenten soup supper at no charge. Feed bills from the co-op elevator, subtracted on the right side.

And every month, at the bottom of the page, one more line: “T. sacks, $158.”

I got out a pencil and did the arithmetic on the back of an envelope. A little over five dollars a sack. Eggs she could have sold, bread, ham, milk, fruit. One hundred fifty-eight dollars a month. About nineteen hundred dollars a year.

Not one dime of it had come out of the grocery money.

Jen had been buying the boy’s breakfast with her egg money the whole time. The grocery bill my mother called a crime every Sunday was our grocery bill, Jen’s and mine, the same as it had always been. Jen had kept the boy’s food on its own page.

I had spent two years griping about money that was never mine to gripe about. And the egg money I laughed at, forty hens that could not buy a tank of gas, had been feeding a boy and keeping his grandpa’s lights on, by the look of it.

I sat at the kitchen table until almost midnight with that green book open in front of me. The furnace kicked on and off. The clock over the stove ticked. Nobody in the house to hear me but me.

Friday morning I made the eggs right. I turned the burner low, the way I had seen Jen do it ten thousand times without paying attention, and I let the butter foam before the eggs went in.