The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

“Erin,” Mom whispered behind me. “I don’t want to come between you and Jon. I’ll go home tomorrow. Your sister can come get me.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Mom. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Neither did she, not really. She just…”

“I know,” I said. “I know, Mom.”

The garage door opened. Jon came in first, stamping his boots on the mat, and he set his duffel down by the door. His mother came in behind him, and she did not take off her coat. Her eyes were red. I had never seen Marjorie Lindqvist with red eyes, not even at her husband’s funeral.

Jon looked at me first. Then he looked at my mother, sitting at the table in her light blue cardigan with her cards in her hand.

He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down, still in his Carhartt coat with the snow melting off the shoulders.

“Elaine,” he said.

Mom set her cards face down. “Jon, honey, it was nothing. I told Erin.”

“How much was it?” he said. “All of it.”

Mom looked at me, and I said, “Eight hundred.”

Jon nodded slowly. He did not look at his mother, who was still standing by the door in her coat. He looked at the oilcloth for a second, at the little faded strawberries on it, and then he got up without a word, picked his keys off the hook, and went back out into the garage.

We heard the pickup start. We heard it back down the driveway, and we saw the headlights sweep across the kitchen ceiling and go.

My mother put her hand over her mouth. Marjorie sat down very slowly on the chair by the door.

“He’s angry,” Marjorie said. It was the first thing she had said to me since Wednesday. “He’s angry at me.”

“I don’t know what he is,” I said, which was the truth.

The three of us sat there for twenty-two minutes. I know because I watched the stove clock the whole time. Nobody played cards. Nobody talked. The furnace came on and went off again. Marjorie still had her coat on.

Then the headlights came back.

Jon came in, stamped his boots again, and walked straight to the table. He took his wallet out of his back pocket, the old brown one I gave him the Christmas before last.

He opened it, and he counted out forty twenty-dollar bills onto the oilcloth in front of my mother, one at a time, the same way she had counted them into his mother’s hand.

He had driven to the ATM at the gas station on M-32 and taken out every dollar it would let him.

“That’s yours, Elaine,” he said. “Every bit of it. You’re not paying to sleep in this house. Not one night. You’re family here. You always were.”

My mother just looked at the money. “Jon, I can’t take this from you.”

“You can,” he said. “It’s not from me. It’s back. It was always yours.”

Then he turned around in his chair and looked at his mother.

I had expected him to be hard. I had expected, maybe, that he would raise his voice, which I had seen him do maybe four times in nineteen years. Instead his voice was very low, and very tired, like a man who had been driving for eleven hours, which he had.

“Mom,” he said. “Why?”