The Sister Who Kept the Towns Money

The loan officer was a girl named Terri who used to babysit for Jared’s cousin. She slid the papers across the desk and wouldn’t meet my eyes, because she had given to the page too.

“I’m sorry the fundraiser didn’t cover it,” she said quietly.

“It’s fine,” I said. It was not fine, but it was the only word I had.

Jared picked up Saturday shifts at the truss plant. He left the house at five-thirty in the morning and came home with sawdust in his eyebrows and his lower back stiff as a board. He never said a word about it.

I drove to Riley the day we paid. I paid every bill myself, in person, at the windows, and I asked for every receipt. The woman at the Riley counter stamped the last one and looked at me over her glasses.

“Most folks just pay online,” she said.

“I want to hold it,” I said.

I put the receipts in a plain manila envelope, along with the loan paper and the discharge sheet Dr. Shapiro had signed. I did not know yet what I would do with it. I only knew I could not throw it in a drawer.

That was the second week of September. On the fourteenth, my mother slipped.

We were in her little kitchen over the garage. She had a pot of green beans going, the way she does, with a ham hock the size of my fist. The window was open, and the sound of Nell’s car coming up the drive floated in.

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” Mom said. “Burt did a fine job on that transmission.”

“What transmission?”

“The Equinox. July.” Mom wiped her hands on her apron. “Cost twenty-six hundred and eighty dollars. Nell paid him cash, out of an envelope. I about fell over. I said, honey, where did you get that kind of money? She said it was from a tax thing.”

She stopped. She looked at my face and set her wooden spoon down on the counter.

“What is it, Becca?”

“Nothing, Mom.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“It’s nothing. I have to get Landon.”

I drove home with all the windows down in the cold. In the driveway, I turned off the engine and just sat, doing the math, the way you do when you already know the answer.

July. The same week the page crossed $3,200. The same week Nell said the site was holding the money for review.

A transmission, $2,680. She had been driving to the care center on the overnight shift, forty minutes each way, in a car that was dying. I knew that. I knew she would have lost her job without it.

I could even see how it happened. A woman behind on everything, a pile of money sitting in her account, a car that would not start. She had probably meant it as a loan.

I could see all of it, and none of it made it right.

I drove back the next morning, before she left for work, and I asked her plainly.

“Nell. Did you pay for the transmission with Landon’s money?”

She did not blink. I will say that for her. She had a steady, practiced face, the face of a woman who has told a lot of families that everything is fine.

“What did Mom say to you?” she asked.

“I’m asking you.”

“Becca. The site took it. I showed you the email.” She set her coffee down. “Let it go. Please. Don’t make this a thing, especially at Mom’s.”