The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

“Mom?” Logan said. “Mom, what’s going on?”

It took her a long time to answer. When she did, her voice was so low I almost could not make it out.

“Three years ago, when your dad lost the plant job,” she said, “we were three payments behind on the house, fourteen hundred and some dollars. The bank sent a letter. I hid it in the cookbook so your dad wouldn’t see it. He was already sick about the job.”

“I didn’t know that,” Logan said.

“You weren’t supposed to. You were thirteen.” She stopped for a long time.

“That Saturday I brought the box home and counted it on the kitchen table, and it was twenty-one hundred dollars. And I just did it. I wrote down six hundred and forty and I drove the rest to the bank Monday morning.”

“That was Aunt Jolene’s money too,” Logan said. Not mean. Just figuring it.

“Half of it was,” Tricia said. “I told myself I’d pay it back by Christmas. Then Christmas came and there wasn’t any extra. Then it was October again and your dad was at the lumber yard and things were tight and I did it again. And by the third year I couldn’t figure out how to stop without telling her.”

“Why didn’t you just tell her?”

“Because she’s stood at that kettle for eight years while I sat in a chair,” Tricia said, and then she was crying hard, the kind of crying you cannot talk through.

“Because she never once complained, and I was stealing from her the whole time she was getting burned.”

I stood at that table with my eyes stinging and the courthouse clock striking the quarter hour. I had been mad since July.

I had been planning since August. I had not planned on feeling sorry for her, and I did, all at once.

When they came back around the canopy, Tricia’s face was blotchy and her ponytail was half out, and Logan was holding her hand like she was the child.

He walked her right up to the table where I was standing.

She did not look at me at first. She looked at the stacks of money, all those banded twenties. Then she made herself lift her eyes.

“How long have you known?” she said.

“Since July,” I said. “Your mother’s garage. The tally sheets.”

She nodded slowly. “And you hired my boy.”

There it was, and I did not dodge it. “I hired your boy because he asked me for work and he’s good with a count,” I said.

“And because I could not think of one other way to keep that box on this table without calling you a thief in front of your brother. I’m sorry it was him. I never said one word to him, and I never will.”

“She didn’t,” Logan said. “I just counted.”

Tricia closed her eyes. “I know she didn’t, baby.” Then, to me: “It’s about twenty-two hundred. Your half. I worked it out every single year. I know the number to the dollar.”

“So do I,” I said.

“I’ll pay it back,” she said. “I can do a hundred a month. It’ll take almost two years. I know that’s not much.”

“Then it takes two years,” I said. “I’m not in any hurry, Tricia. I just didn’t want to find out at Thanksgiving that it was four years.”