By Friday night she had read every comment at least twice. She read them at the kitchen table with a glass of milk going warm beside her elbow, and she did not say a single word the whole time. Then she closed the phone and said, “Mom, I want to go see him.”
I had already reached for the insurance card. It is the first thing any grown woman in my position would do, and I want to say so plainly.
“Honey, our deductible is a thousand dollars,” I said. “The damage is maybe a hundred and fifty. Insurance would never pay a dime of it. I could mail him a check, and that would be cleaner.”
“A check is a way of not showing up,” Emma said.
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. She sounded exactly like her grandmother.
“He’s eighty,” she said. “He lives by himself. Somebody wrote a thing about his mailbox, and he doesn’t even know the girl who did it. I want him to see my face. I want him to know I’m not what she called me.”
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There was no good argument against that, and I have not found one since.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go Saturday.”
She went upstairs, and I stood in the kitchen listening to her footsteps cross the ceiling. After a while I followed. Her door was open a hand’s width, and I pushed it gently.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed. In front of her was the old coffee can she had kept since she took the diner job at fifteen and a half. She had dumped it out onto the carpet: quarters, ones, a few fives gone soft as cloth, a roll of dimes she had made herself with a rubber band.
She was counting it into piles of ten.
“Six weeks of breakfast shifts,” she said without looking up. “Ronald leaves a dollar fifty every Saturday. I think he does it so I’ll remember him.”
“Emma. That’s your laptop money.”
She had been saving for a used one since August, for college. It was the only thing she had asked for all year, and she had her heart set on a particular gray one at the secondhand store in Warsaw.
“It’s three hundred and forty dollars,” she said. “A mailbox and a post and a taillight can’t be more than a hundred and fifty. I’ll give him whatever he needs. And if he doesn’t need it, I’ll know I came.”
“Honey, you don’t owe him all of it.”
“I know.” She picked up a stack of ones and squared the edges against her knee. “Aunt Tammy can say what she wants. I’m not going to be the girl who hid. I want him to see I brought all of it.”
I sat down on the carpet beside her and we counted the rest together. It came to $340 exactly. Neither of us said anything about that.
My father-in-law, Kermit, has a post-hole digger hanging from a nail in his barn, the old clamshell kind with wooden handles gone dark from fifty years of palms. Emma called him that night. He did not ask a single question. He said, “It’ll be on the barn door at seven,” and it was.