“The quilting ladies at church are raffling a quilt for the fall supper,” she said. “I asked Ida Mae if the money could go to Addie’s gas instead of the roof fund. She said she’d ask the others.”
The others said yes. The roof had waited forty years and could wait one more, was how Ida Mae put it. She was eighty-one and had been in that quilting circle since before I was born.
The quilt was a double wedding ring pattern in blues and yellows, hand quilted, with a scalloped edge.
It took six women most of the summer. Tickets were five dollars apiece, and the drawing would be at the ballfield the last Saturday of October.
Clara made herself a clipboard with a sheet for names and phone numbers. She found an old coffee can in the garage, washed it out, and cut a slot in the plastic lid with my good scissors, which I did not mention.
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Then she went door to door. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon in October, after softball and after church, she walked the streets of Broken Bow in her jacket with that can and that clipboard.
I drove her to the edges of town, out by the sale barn and the new houses past the hospital, and I sat in the car and watched her go up to doors by herself. She would not let me come up with her.
“It’s not your raffle,” she told me. “If you come, they’ll buy it because of you. I want them to buy it because of Addie.”
Some people said no. Most people said yes. An old man out on the east side of town bought one ticket, then went back inside and came out with a peppermint for her, and she put the peppermint in the can too.
By the last week of October she had sold ninety-six tickets. Ninety-six times five dollars is four hundred and eighty dollars.
She had counted it on our kitchen table three times and written the number at the top of her clipboard and circled it.
Four hundred and eighty dollars, in fives and tens and twenties and a few rolled stacks of ones from the old men who paid in whatever they had in their pockets.
Gail had opened a little account at the bank downtown just for Addie’s travel money, so people could drop in donations without her having to handle cash.
Clara wanted to take the can in herself, but the bank keeps hours like a bank, and she was in school all day.
That is where Tawny came in.
Tawny is Burl’s older sister. She is forty-one. She lives in a rented house on the north side of town, works the front desk at the nursing home, and has had a hard few years that I will not pretend she brought all on herself.
Her husband left. Her car needed a transmission. Her hours got cut in the spring and never quite came back.
She is behind on things, and she has been behind on things long enough that she has stopped talking about it.
She drives right past the bank on her way to the nursing home every single morning.
On the Sunday before, at our house for dinner, she heard Clara say she wished she could get the money in before the drawing.