It was the one she got for her fifth birthday. It has a chipped ear. She had never once opened it, not for a toy or a candy bar or a ticket to the fair.
“Mom,” she said. “I counted it.” “Counted what, sweetheart?”
“I’ve got thirty-eight dollars and sixty-one cents.” She held out the pig. “It’s not eleven hundred. But it’s something. You could put it with yours.”
I put down the towels. I did not trust myself to speak.
“I thought if I gave you mine,” she said, very reasonable, “you wouldn’t have to take as much out of the furnace. Because Daddy said the furnace is cold in January.”
I sat down on the floor of the hall, right where I was, with my back against the linen closet. She sat down next to me and set the pig in her lap, and I put my arms around the two of them.
“Baby,” I said. “That’s yours. You keep that.” “But it’s for the trip.”
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“It’s for whatever you want it to be for. It’s yours, because you earned it by being the kind of person who would offer it.”
She was quiet. Then she said, into my shoulder, “Do you think Uncle Barry knows I’d have given him a little? If he’d asked?”
I felt that go through me like cold water. “I think,” I said slowly, “that he did not think to ask.”
“I’d have said yes. Maybe not all of it.” She sniffed. “But some.”
“I know you would.” “That’s what’s sad,” she said. “That I’d have said yes.”
I held her until the towels went cool in the basket. I have never in my life wanted so badly to make a thing not have happened.
Barry called on Monday.
“Hey, Whitney. Just checking in. Hope Lacey got over being sore about that barn thing. Tell her I’m sorry about the mess, I just needed the space. Call me, we’ll have you all out for dinner.”
I erased it. I did not call him back.
I want to be fair to him, because my mother raised me to be. I found out later, in pieces, what was going on with Barry that fall.
His business had slowed. The Ram was a new truck he should not have bought, and he was three payments behind with the bank. He had a notice taped inside his kitchen cupboard, and he had told no one in the family.
On Wednesday morning I had the bank cut a cashier’s check for $1,100, because a personal check can be argued with and a cashier’s check cannot. I put it in an envelope with Bonita’s name on it, and I put the pink ticket in a separate envelope, and I put both in my purse.
Wednesday night, I laid out the clothes Lacey would wear to the meeting. She was going to come. I had asked her, and she had thought about it for most of an hour, and then she had said yes.
“I want to see them read it,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything.”
“I won’t.” She was quiet. “I’m going to bring my notebook, though.”
“Why?” “So everybody can see how many Sundays it was.”