Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

“I thought you’d never check,” he said. “I thought you’d never know. And I was going to pay you back. I swear I was going to pay you back somehow.”

Grandma didn’t say anything to that. She just waited.

“That’s not true,” he said after a while. “I don’t know if I was going to pay you back. I don’t know what I was going to do. I’m sorry, Grandma.”

Then he reached into his jacket and took out a white bank envelope, fat and soft at the corners.

Marlene told me later how it went. She drove straight to the body shop and sat him down in her car. The check from the state had gone into his account the day before, and he had not given his buddy a dime of it yet, because the buddy was out of town until the weekend.

So she took him to the bank on Main, and she stood next to him at the teller window while he took out four thousand dollars in cash, and the teller, who has known our family for thirty years, counted it out twice and did not ask one question.

The state had held back its small share for taxes, so Marlene made up the difference from her own purse. The envelope held a full four thousand.

Now Tanner opened that envelope in front of the whole store and counted it into Grandma’s hand.

He counted it out loud. Hundred-dollar bills. One hundred. Two hundred. Three. His hands were shaking and he lost his place once around twenty-three hundred and had to start that stack over.

Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. Rollie took his cap off and held it in his lap.

Grandma held her hand out flat the whole time, steady as a table, and let him lay every bill in it. When he got to four thousand, he stopped, and folded the envelope, and put it in his pocket.

“That’s all of it,” he said. “Every dollar.”

“Thank you,” Grandma said.

That was all. Thank you. Like he had carried in her groceries.

Then she did something I did not expect.

She handed the whole stack of bills to me to hold, and she opened her coin purse, Gertie’s little black snap purse, and took out the two dollar bills folded in quarters. Friday’s money.

She turned to Dorcas.

“I’d like one ticket for Friday,” she said. “My numbers.”

Dorcas already had the slip. I do not know how long she had been holding it. She ran it through the machine and the ticket came curling out and she tore it off and handed it across the counter.

Grandma did not take it. She nodded at Tanner.

“Give it to him,” she said.

Dorcas handed it to Tanner. He stood there holding it like it was hot.

“That’s the last one you carry for me,” Grandma told him. “You take that home and you put it on your dresser where you can see it. And on Saturday morning you check it yourself, and you call me, and whatever it says, you tell me the truth.”

He nodded. He could not talk.

“And after that,” she said, “I’ll buy my own. Jodie can drive me.”

I said I would. I meant it more than anything I have ever said.

Grandma was not done. She turned to my sister, and her face softened.