The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table
We had been putting money into a savings account since March for the furnace. Ours is twenty-six years old, and the man from the heating company told us last fall that he wasn’t sure it would see another January. We had a little over four thousand in there.
“I need sixteen hundred dollars in cash,” I told Kim. “In twenties, please.”
She didn’t blink. She counts out cash all day long. She just asked whether I wanted it in an envelope, and I said yes, and she counted it twice in front of me, eighty bills, and banded it in four stacks of twenty.
“Big purchase?” she asked, making conversation.
“Paying a debt,” I said. It was the truest thing I could think of.
I put the envelope in the inside pocket of my purse and drove to the bus barn. I had told Jeff I would come in for a few hours to finish the brakes on bus fourteen, because it was due back on its route Tuesday and I don’t leave a job half done.
So I spent Saturday on a creeper under a school bus, in my dark green work shirt with the district patch on it, with sixteen hundred dollars in my purse in a locker twenty feet away. I don’t think I have ever done brake work so carefully in my life. It gave my hands something to do.
At a quarter to five I washed up in the shop sink, braided my hair back again because it had come half loose, and went home to pick up Ethan.
Every year on the last weekend of summer, Doug’s wife Lisa has the family out for supper. Sweet corn, pork chops off the grill, her potato salad, a sheet cake. It’s a tradition from when the boys were little. She had called on Wednesday to make sure we were coming.
I liked Lisa. I still do. She works at the clinic in town, checking people in, and she is one of those women who remembers your mother’s birthday. I did not think she knew what Doug had paid the boys. I found out later I was right.
Ethan rode beside me in the pickup with his hands between his knees. He had put on a clean shirt and then, at the last second, changed back into the faded gray t-shirt he’d worn most of the summer. I didn’t ask him why. I think he wanted to look like a worker.
“Are you going to yell at Uncle Doug?” he asked when we turned onto the gravel.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to yell at anybody.”
“Is he going to be mad at me?”
“No, honey. This isn’t about you doing anything. This is about you being owed something.” I looked at him. “When we get in there, I’m going to ask you to hold out your hand. Will you do that for me?”
He looked at me sideways. “What for?”
“You’ll see. Just hold it out and keep it there.”