The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

I will tell it the way Elsa told me, because it is not mine to improve. He asked for her by name. She said, “This is Elsa,” and he said, “Mom, it’s me,” and then neither of them said anything for what she believes was a full minute. She could hear a little girl in the background asking who he was talking to. Then he told her about the baby, and she sat down on the kitchen floor.

Before they hung up he asked, “Mom, is Dad still reading it?”

“Every Saturday,” she said. “Like a man crossing a creek on rocks.”

“Does he know it’s you?”

“No.”

“Tell him something,” Tobin said. “I do not know what. But I think I have been trying to come home for eleven years, and I did not know the door was open.”

That is why the cursive. After she hung up, Elsa sat at the table until midnight. For eleven years she had been hiding behind a printed hand, and for eleven years the man she was hiding from had been saying the name anyway, and she realized she had been protecting herself, not me. She thought, if he is coming home, he is not coming home to a woman who prints.

She wrote it in her own hand at one in the morning and folded it in thirds. She ironed it, because she could not help herself.

“I was going to tell you in the car,” she said. “But I thought, I will let him have one more Saturday. I will wait until I hear him say it.”

“I could not say it,” I said.

“I know. I sat here listening to you not say it. And I thought, that is the loudest I have ever heard that name.”

The Safe I Had Not Opened

When we went back inside it was past seven, and Lavon’s car was in the lot. I had left the front door unlocked and the open sign dark. She stood at the counter in her coat, holding the jar against her chest.

She looked at the two of us and said, “Well. It is about time.”

“You knew,” I said.

“Linus, I have known where your boy was since the spring after he left. I have known his address and his girl’s name and his daughter’s birthday. He sent me a card every Christmas and wrote on it, ‘Tell Dad nothing unless he asks.’ So I told you nothing. You never asked.”

I could not speak.

“I am going to show you something,” Lavon said, “and then I want you to sit down.”

She went into the back office, to the old Mosler safe in the corner, the one my father bought in 1962 and I had not opened since March because there is nothing in it but the deed and a roll of quarters. She knelt, which at her age took a while, spun the dial from memory, and pulled out a Folgers can I had never seen.

It was heavy. A strip of masking tape ran across the lid, and on it, in her small bookkeeper’s hand, one letter. T.

“Money orders,” she said. “He sent one every month, starting the summer Junie turned two. A hundred dollars, fifty in a bad month. Always to me, always in the store’s name, never a note. I could not put them in the account, because you would have seen them on the statement and sent them back. So I put them in the can. I have counted it every December.”

I took off the lid. The money orders were rolled in rubber bands by year. I sat down in my father’s old desk chair and counted, and I will not tell you how long it took, because my eyes were not working right. Nine thousand four hundred dollars, to the dollar. And nineteen hundred more.

“I told him he did not owe interest,” Lavon said. “He said the rest was for the store’s trouble.”

I put my head down on that desk and cried the way I had not cried since my father’s funeral. Lavon laid her hand on the back of my neck like I was nine and sweeping her floor.

“Linus,” she said. “That boy has been praying for you, too. You do know that.”

“How would you know?”

“Because that is what a name in a jar is. It goes both ways. You did not think you were the only man in this story who could carry somebody.”