Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

The agent was kind about it on the phone, but kind doesn’t buy a crib. The landlord said he wasn’t going to fix the place. He was going to let it go.

We had about nine hundred dollars in savings. We had a car payment and a newborn and no house.

I remember sitting in my pickup in Gail’s driveway with my hands on the wheel, not going anywhere, just sitting there because it was the only place I could think.

Curtis showed up the second morning with his flatbed, a skid loader on the trailer and four square shovels. He didn’t call ahead.

He never did. He just backed the trailer up to that porch and started hauling ruined furniture to the road.

He worked beside me for three days. He had his own spring work waiting, planting on 1,100 acres with a hired man and an old tractor, and he spent three days in my mud instead. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to.

On the third evening, when the house was empty and the walls were stripped to the studs, he walked over to my pickup, pulled an envelope out of his coat and set it on my dash.

It was a check for five thousand dollars, made out to Amber and me.

“Curtis,” I said. “I can’t.”

“It’s a gift,” he said. “Don’t you dare insult me by trying to pay it back. You’d do the same.”

I would have. That was true. I just never thought I’d be the one on the receiving end.

I said thank you and I meant it, and he nodded once and drove off with the skid loader rattling on the trailer.

That five thousand was first and last month on a little rental in Westbrook, three blocks from Gail.

It was a used crib from a lady at church, a couch from the classifieds, and the rest of a month’s groceries while we got our feet under us. It kept us off the edge.

I want to be honest about something. Even though Curtis called it a gift, I never felt right about it. A man helps you shovel, that’s one thing.

A man hands you five thousand dollars, that’s another, and I’m built in a way that can’t just leave it sitting there.

So that summer I started taking Saturday work. Farmers on the gravel roads around Westbrook have trucks and tractors that break on Saturdays like anyplace else, and a diesel mechanic who’ll come to the yard with his tools is worth calling.

Whatever I made on Saturdays went into a coffee can on the top shelf of our closet. Not all of it, some weeks.

Some weeks the car needed tires or Jace needed shoes. But most weeks something went in that can, and Amber knew it.

“He’ll never take it,” she told me one night, standing in the closet doorway with Jolie on her hip. “You know my brother. He’ll be insulted. He told you not to.”

“Then it’ll sit there,” I said. “But it’ll be there.”

She didn’t argue. Amber grew up on that farm. She knew what it was to owe somebody and to want the slate clean, even if the other person never wrote anything on it. She kissed me on the cheek and took Jolie to bed.

It took us two years to fill that can. By the end of this summer there were fifty one hundred dollar bills in it that I’d traded small bills for at the bank in town.