Three Brown Sacks Before Dawn
I work nights at the nursing home out on the highway, seven in the evening to three thirty in the morning, four nights a week. It is not the shift anybody wants. It pays a dollar and a half more an hour, and when you are raising a boy by yourself, a dollar and a half is the electric bill.
Tyler’s daddy, Jeff, and I split when Tyler was two. Jeff works pipeline in North Dakota now. He calls Tyler every Sunday evening, and his support check comes on the first of the month, every month, and I have never once had to chase him for it.
I want to say that plainly, because people assume things about the daddy, and Jeff has done what he said he would do.
My own daddy has been gone six years. He drove a feed truck for the co-op for most of my life and died of a heart attack in the cab one August afternoon, parked at a farm on Route 94, with the auger still running.
After that it was Mama and me, and then it was Mama and me and Tyler. That is the whole family, the three of us, and it had always been enough.
Mama lives a quarter mile down Peeler Road from me, in the same little white house I grew up in. On my work nights she walks up the road around six thirty, sleeps on my couch, gets Tyler fed and dressed and onto the bus at seven ten, and then she goes on to her own job at the grocery deli in town.
So Mama handled the mornings. And because Mama handled the mornings, Mama handled the lunch money.
Hollis Elementary takes lunch money two ways. You can put it on a card online, but the company charges you two dollars and fifty cents every single time you do it. Or you can send cash in an envelope with the child’s name on it, and the office puts it on the account.
Every Sunday night I put thirty dollars in an envelope with Tyler’s name on it, and I handed it to Mama, and Monday morning she slid it into the front pocket of his backpack.
Lunch at Hollis is two dollars and eighty cents. Breakfast is a dollar sixty-five. Tyler eats both, because he is eight and he is always hungry, and on Fridays he likes the ice cream cup. Thirty dollars covered all of it with a little left over, and the left over was supposed to sit on the account for the weeks I came up short.
The low-balance calls went to Mama’s phone. That was on purpose, and it was my doing.
When I filled out his enrollment papers two years ago, I put Mama’s house phone as the morning contact, because I sleep with my phone silenced from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, and I did not want the school calling me about a fever and getting no answer.
Mama signed his folder every night I worked. The notes came home in the folder.
Every Sunday, when I handed her the envelope, she said the same thing. “Got it on his account, baby.” Two years of Sundays. I never once thought to check behind her, because why would you check behind your mother?
At three thirty I clocked out. I sat in my car in the parking lot with the heater running, and I did not start home for a long time.