The Cash Box in Dad’s Closet

The first cold morning

On the third Tuesday in December the thermometer on my father’s porch read eighteen below.

I got up at five and put on my coat, his wool socks and the gloves he left on the hook by the door, and I started the Ford. It took four tries. It always does.

I drove out Route 2 at half past six in the dark with the cab so cold my breath turned to frost on the dashboard. I drove past the first box, and the second, and the Alcorn place, where the coffee was already on and a thin line of smoke stood straight up from the stovepipe like a pencil mark on a white page.

I drove past Box 31, where there was a new roof and a Christmas wreath. I drove past Box 14, a dark clean roof in the first gray light, a ribbon of smoke curling off the chimney.

I drove fifty-one boxes and every roof was clear.

At Box 52, I stopped.

It was a small yellow house with a green door, set back from the road, a child’s bicycle on its side in the yard, half buried. Snow lay thick and unbroken on the roof. No smoke, no dark patch at the chimney. A light on in one window, and a small red mitten on a fence post.

I sat there with the engine running and my breath on the windshield and thought about a man doing this for forty-one years. Sitting here. Writing a number in a book.

Then I took out a pencil and opened my father’s field book to a clean page. I wrote the date. I wrote eighteen below. I wrote Box 52, and I drew a small circle beside it and left it empty.

Lorraine unlocked the co-op office at eight. I was at the door in my coat with a white envelope.

She did not say anything. She took her glasses off. She turned the sign on the door.

“These are the ones,” I said, and I read her the number.

She did not write down a name. She did not ask for one. She put the envelope in a drawer, and she laid her hand on mine on the counter.

“Under what name?” she said.

“Friend,” I said.

I drove back out that afternoon. The snow was still on the roof of the yellow house. By the next morning it was gone, and there was a dark roof under a gray ribbon of smoke, and a little boy in a red knit cap was in the yard with a shovel, digging a path to his bicycle.

I think about what Lorraine said, that a favor is something you owe back and he did not want anybody to owe him. I have decided he was wrong about one thing. We do owe him. It is the only debt I have ever been glad to carry, and I intend to pay it the way he taught me, slowly, in cash, on a Monday, where nobody can see.

I want you to know that it was eighteen below that morning, and I drove the whole route in my coat, because the heater in his truck still does not work, and I have decided never to fix it.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.