The Cans My Daughter Collected

Lacey put her finger on the name and held it there. “That’s his name,” she said.

“Yes, honey,” Ralph said. “It is.” Nobody said anything for a moment. The space heater ticked.

“Young lady, I weigh a lot of cans,” he said. “Thousands of pounds every month. I’ve never once weighed a year of somebody’s Sundays.”

Lacey’s chin shook, one time. Then she held it still, the way she had held her voice in the barn.

“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Hostetler?” “You can ask me anything.”

“If I’d brought them in myself, would they still have counted?” He was quiet. “Every pound,” he said. “Every pound, same as anybody’s.”

“Okay,” she said. “I just wanted to know they counted.” “Ralph,” I said. “May I have a copy of that ticket?”

“It is a copy,” he said. “The yellow one’s in the file. Take the pink. It’s got her name on it, in a way. It’s got her cans.”

He folded it once and handed it to me, not to Lacey. I think he knew I would carry it better.

“What are you going to do, Whitney?” “Do you want me to say anything to Barry?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. Please. I want him to keep thinking nobody knows.”

“Why?” “Because I don’t want him ready.”

On the drive home, Lacey didn’t say a word until the stop sign at County Road 9.

Then she said, “Are you going to tell Uncle Barry we know?”

“No,” I said. “Not tonight.” “But it was my cans,” she said.

“Yes.” “And he didn’t even ask.” “No, he didn’t.”

She turned and looked out the window at the beans standing in the field, brown and rattling, with the combine already in the next section over. “That’s the part I don’t like,” she said. “Not the money. That he didn’t ask.”

Corey got home at eleven-twenty that night. I was sitting at the kitchen counter with the pink ticket flat in front of me and a cup of tea gone cold beside it.

“I’ll go out there right now,” he said. “I know you would.”

“That man sat at your mother’s table.” “I know.”

“Corey.” I put my hand over his. “That is what he would like. He’d like it to turn into you and him in a yard, and everybody saying it got out of hand. Then it’s about a fight, and not about what he did.”

“So what do we do?” he asked.

“We pay the bus,” I said. “Ourselves. Tonight. And Thursday I put this on the table at the meeting and let everybody who gave that child a can read the name on it.”

“That’s eleven hundred dollars.” “I know what it is.” “That’s the furnace money.”

“It’s the furnace money,” I agreed. “And the furnace has two more winters in it, the man said. Lacey has one fifth grade.”

He thought about it a long while. Then he said, “You want me there?”

“Back row. And quiet.” “I can be quiet.” “You can be a wall,” I said. “That’s different from quiet, but it’ll do.”

I would like to tell you the hardest part of that week was Barry. It was not.

The hardest part came on Sunday night.

I was folding towels in the upstairs hall when I heard Lacey’s door open, and then the small noise of her bare feet on the floor, and then her standing there in her nightgown holding a pink plastic piggy bank in both arms.