The Lamb Check She Gave Away

The Check

The sale checks at our fair come in the mail three or four weeks after.

The committee pools the buyers’ money, takes out the small commission that pays for the sale bill printing and the auctioneer, and mails each kid a check with a letter from the board thanking her for her project.

Juanita’s check came on a Tuesday in September. It was for one thousand, seven hundred and forty-six dollars.

She opened it at the mailbox at the end of our lane, standing in the gravel in her school shoes, and she read the letter twice before she said anything.

“It says thank you for your project, Juanita Kessler,” she said. “It doesn’t say Grandpa.”

“No,” I said. “It’s your check. It’s your name on it.”

We walked back up the lane together. I had a plan for that money, the same plan every farm mother has.

Half in her savings at the bank in town, half toward next year’s lamb and feed.

I told her so on the walk. She listened, nodded, and then sat down on the porch steps with the envelope on her knees.

“Mom,” she said. “Can I give it to Grandma Lila’s pantry?”

I sat down next to her. My mother-in-law, Lila, started the food pantry at their church eleven years ago, in a closet off the fellowship hall with two shelves of canned corn.

When Lila got sick, Garth took it over. After she died, he kept running it. He has never missed a Saturday.

Juanita had helped him there all summer, carrying cans and handing out bags. I knew she had seen the shelves.

Our county has more empty shelves than anyone wants to say out loud, especially once the summer work is over and before the harvest money comes in.

“Why, honey?” I asked. I had to be sure. I did not want my daughter giving away seventeen hundred dollars to make a point, or to make her grandpa feel bad. That is not the girl I was trying to raise.

She looked at the check a long time. “Grandpa said the peanut butter’s all gone,” she said.

“He said they ran out of peanut butter in July and he’s been buying it at the dollar store out of his own pocket. And Grandma Lila started it. And Biscuit was mine.”

Then she said the thing I still think about. “And I want him to stand with me.”

“For what?”

“For the picture. When I give it to him. They always take a picture for the paper when somebody gives the pantry money. I want him to stand with me in the picture.”

She pulled her knees up. “I want him to be in the picture with me, not instead of me.”

I did not say anything for a minute, because I could not.

I put my arm around her and looked out at the side yard where she had set Biscuit’s feet forty times a night. Then I said, “Okay. Let’s call Grandpa.”