The Gumball Ring at the Bursar’s Window

The quarter machine

That Saturday, Emma had an extra shift at the nursing home. Patrice was asleep after a double. Somebody needed to take the boys for haircuts before church on Sunday, and I volunteered.

The barber in Windsor is an older man named Floyd who has cut hair on the square for forty years. He has a jar of suckers by the register and a red quarter machine by the door, the old kind with gumballs and the little plastic capsules mixed in.

Owen went first. Sam sat on the bench beside me and swung his legs and watched the quarter machine like it might do something.

“Can I have a gumball?” he asked.

I dug in my jacket pocket and came up with two quarters. Sam put them in one at a time, very carefully, and turned the crank with both hands. It made that grinding sound, and then something rattled down the chute.

It was not a gumball. It was one of the plastic capsules. Sam popped it open and found a plastic ring inside with a fake jewel on it, the kind you got at the county fair when you were small.

He looked at it with real disgust.

“That’s for girls,” he said, and held it out to me. “You can have it. You can give it to Emma.”

I sat there with that fifty-cent ring in my palm. Floyd’s clippers were buzzing. Owen was complaining that it tickled. Outside, the redbud by the courthouse had just started to come out.

“Thanks, bud,” I said. “I think I will.”

I put it in the inside pocket of my work jacket and zipped it. Then I bought Sam a sucker from Floyd’s jar to make up for his lost gumball, and he said it was a better deal anyway.

Monday morning

I took off from the shop at ten on Monday. My foreman, a big quiet man named Hank, did not even ask why. He just said, “Go on,” and went back to grinding.

I wore my work jacket because I did not have time to change. It is a black canvas jacket, and it has a burn mark across the back where a piece of slag caught it my first month at the shop. My mom has offered to patch it six times.

At the credit union, the teller asked me if I was sure. She did it twice. I told her I was sure both times, and she printed out a cashier’s check made out to the college for eleven thousand four hundred dollars.

There was two hundred dollars left in the account. I left it there. Dad was right about that much. You keep something in a place you cannot see.

Then I called Emma. She was between classes, in the skills lab, practicing IV starts on the rubber arm.

“Can you meet me at the business office at eleven forty?” I asked.

“Why?” she said. “Caleb, I already called them. They’re not going to give me more time.”

“Just meet me,” I said. “Please. I need you there.”

She was quiet for a second. “Okay,” she said. “But I’ve only got twenty minutes.”