Clara sat there with her hands flat on the table. She did not cry. She went very still, the way she does when she is trying to understand something that does not fit.
“All of it?” she said.
“All of it.”
“The peppermint man’s money too?”
“All of it, honey.”
She looked down at her hands. She has a little scar on her thumb from a fishhook, and she rubbed it with her other thumb.
Then she said the thing that I will remember when I am an old woman.
“Is Addie still going to be able to go Monday?”
Not, how could she. Not, I hate her. Not, it isn’t fair. Just Addie, first and only. I had to get up and stand at the sink for a minute and look out the window.
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When I came back I had the Christmas envelope.
We keep it in the cupboard over the refrigerator, behind the cake pans, where you need the step stool to reach.
Since January, most weeks, I had put a twenty in it. Some weeks I could not. Some weeks Burl put in an extra ten from his overtime.
It was a plain white envelope gone soft from handling. I sat down across from Clara and opened it and counted it out on the table in front of her, the way she had counted her raffle money all month.
Six hundred and twelve dollars.
I counted out four hundred and eighty and pushed it across the table to her side. The rest, a hundred and thirty-two dollars, I put back in the envelope and set to one side.
“That’s our Christmas,” Clara said.
“It’s Addie’s gas,” I said. “Christmas can be smaller this year.”
She looked at the money for a long time. Then she looked at me, and I could see her trying to decide whether to argue. She is a fair child. She hates being given things she did not earn.
“But that’s not what people bought tickets for,” she said. “They bought tickets to help Addie. If it’s our money, it’s not their money.”
“Their money already helped Aunt Tawny keep her heat on going into November,” I said. “That’s not what they meant it for, but it’s done, and Aunt Tawny is going to pay it back to us. Every dollar. This is just us getting it to Addie first.”
She thought about that. She nodded once, slowly, like a judge.
“Can I be the one to give it to Gail?”
“I was going to ask you to.”
She got up and went to the drawer where I keep the good envelopes, the thick white ones I buy for wedding cards.
She brought one back and folded the bills into it neatly, facing all the same way, the fives with the fives and the twenties with the twenties.
She did not write anything on the outside. She just licked it shut and pressed it flat with the heel of her hand and set it on the counter by her softball bag, where she would not forget it.
Saturday morning the sun came up over the Sandhills bright and clear, and the frost was gone off the yard by eight. Burl had waited to leave until Clara was up, which he never does in harvest.