The Jar I Kept for Twenty Nine Years

The List

The Roadrunners were my idea. It is the part I am proudest of and the part I am most ashamed of.

In March, after a long gray winter, six women in the Circle were sitting in the church kitchen saying none of us ever went anywhere. I said, why don’t we just go. I said I would find a coach and a matinee and a buffet, each woman would pay for her seat, and we would have one Saturday a month that belonged to us.

I found a coach company out of Springfield that sent a forty-six-seat bus and a driver named Hobart. The arithmetic was simple. The coach, the matinee, the buffet and the driver’s tip came to a hundred and forty dollars a seat at forty seats. Below forty, the company charged us for forty anyway. I set the seat at a hundred and sixty because the Circle voted to put twenty dollars from every seat into the mission fund. I kept the money in a gray cash box from the dental office and every payment in a green ledger.

The first three trips were full, and the women hugged me in the church lot at the end of the day. Then it got hot, and people had funerals and graduations, and the list slipped. July, thirty-six. August, thirty-nine. September, thirty-seven. The company still charged for forty. I did the arithmetic on a legal pad after the last patient left, and then I wrote a check on the account Neil and I call the furnace money.

We opened it the winter our old furnace died on the coldest night of 2019 and cost four thousand dollars we did not have. We promised never to touch it except for the furnace, the roof or an emergency with a child’s name on it. Neil checks the balance on his phone every few months, and every time it says what it said last time, he nods. It is the one thing in our life he is certain of.

By the end of September the shortfall was eleven hundred and forty dollars: eight empty seats that summer at a hundred and forty dollars each, plus a twenty-dollar late fee on a deposit I was too ashamed to explain. I told Neil I was putting the extra into a CD at the credit union. I told him in July. I told him again in August.

I never meant to take a penny for myself. But I lied to my husband three times in a pleasant voice over supper, and somewhere in August I decided that if I could only fill forty-six seats I could put it all back before anyone knew. That is the kind of arithmetic fear does.

That is why I needed Velda. I needed a seat filled by someone I assumed would not miss a hundred and sixty dollars. That is the first ugly thing in my reasoning: I had decided what my mother-in-law could afford without ever asking her.