The burn barrel
Before I left that evening, I took the notice out of my back pocket.
Merle has a burn barrel behind his shed, the old fifty-five gallon kind, and he was out there burning a few leaves while it was still light. I walked over and held up the folded paper.
“You mind?” I said.
“Be my guest,” Merle said.
I dropped it in. It caught on the corner first, the company letterhead curling up brown and then black, and then the whole thing went in one flare and was gone.
Merle poked it down with a stick. “That’s the best thing I’ve burned all year,” he said.
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I went back across the lane to tell Mom goodbye. She was standing in her kitchen with the receipt from Avis in her hand.
She had gotten one of those magnets off the fridge, the one shaped like a little red barn that I bought her at the state fair, and she put the receipt right in the middle of the fridge door where she could see it every time she walked in from outside.
“I’m going to leave that right there,” she said.
“You leave it as long as you want.”
“I’m going to leave it till they bury me,” she said, and then she laughed, and I laughed, and it was the first time either of us had laughed all day.
After
Avis called me the next week. The owners had asked about the notice, and she told them it was a family mix-up, now paid in full, and they let it go. She said she’d asked them to mail any letters for Mom’s lot to my address too, from now on.
Odell drove over that Saturday and fixed a sticking hinge on Mom’s front door that had bothered her for months. He never said a word about the roof money. When I brought it up, he said the roof had made it through forty years and it could make it through one more.
Mom started handing me her rent on the Sunday before the first. I drive it to the window myself, and Avis writes the receipt, and I bring it back, and Mom writes it in a brand new receipt book from the dime store. Gave Jolene $525 for lot rent. And I initial it.
In the middle of November, an envelope showed up in my mailbox with no return address. Inside were five twenty-dollar bills and a note on the back of a tire shop work order. It said, first of it. C.
I told Mom. She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Write it down.”
So I did.
The notice went in Merle’s burn barrel, and the receipt went on Mom’s fridge, under the red barn magnet by the door she walks in from outside. It is still there.