My grandson stacked tires every Saturday for seven months to pay for a $640 bass guitar, and it never came home. Then the man who owns the shop phoned me and said, “Lois, that boy hasn’t kept one dollar I’ve paid him. The woman who gets it is at my counter right now, and she asked if you know.”
Kian was fourteen, and he was the last piece of my daughter I had.
Tonia died two winters ago on an icy stretch of road, driving home from a double shift.
The other driver walked away from it.
Since then it’s been the two of us in my small house in Altoona, living on my pension and what I make keeping the books at a fabric store on Saturdays.
He never asked me for a thing.
Not sneakers. Not a phone with a screen that wasn’t cracked.
So when he started slowing down at the music shop window every time we drove past it, I paid attention.
A used bass. Cherry red, with a chip out of the wood near the strap.
$640 on a yellow tag.
His mother played bass in a bar band before he was born. He’d found her old picks in a coffee can in the garage, and he kept one in his wallet.
“I want a job,” he said one night in March.
“You’re fourteen, honey.”
“Mr. Jung said I can sweep the bays and stack tires on Saturdays. He’ll pay cash.”
Joe Jung had changed my oil since 1998. He kept the radio in his garage on a polka station nobody would admit to liking.
I said yes.
Every Saturday Kian came home at four with black in the creases of his knuckles that no soap would touch.
“How close?” I’d ask.
“Closer, Grandma.”
April went by. May. The Fourth of July.
August.
No guitar.
Eleven dollars an hour, six hours a week. I’ve kept other people’s books for thirty years, and I don’t need a calculator for that one. By August he could have bought that bass twice.
I told myself there was an amp on his list too.
Then I did his laundry.
There was a wad of receipts in the back pocket of his jeans, gone soft in the wash.
A pharmacy on the far side of town. One I’d never set foot in.
Forty dollars. Forty dollars. Forty dollars. A Saturday date on every one.
The name at the top had washed out.
I laid them on the kitchen table and waited for him.
He came in, saw them, and went white around the mouth.
“Whose prescriptions are these, Kian?”
“Mr. Jung’s. I pick stuff up for him.”
“Across town? On the bus?”
“It’s on the way.”
It was on the way to nothing.
He took the receipts off the table, folded them twice and went upstairs.
Three Saturdays later he didn’t come home at four.
Or five.
At ten after nine the back door opened and he walked in without his winter coat. The good one, the one I’d paid off at the register a few dollars at a time last fall.
“Where’s your coat?”
“I gave it to somebody.”
“You gave it to WHO?”
“Somebody who needed it more than me. Grandma, please. Can you just leave it?”
I couldn’t leave it.
I lay awake running every ugly thing a grieving boy might be paying for. Somebody older. Pills. Somebody holding something over him.
I made up my mind to drive to the shop the next Saturday and ask Joe to his face.
Joe called first.
I was in the back of the fabric store, typing invoices, when my cell went off.
“Lois. It’s Joe Jung.”
“Is he hurt?”
“No. He’s out back with the tires. He doesn’t know I’m calling.”
Then nothing. Just the polka station behind him.
“How much you figure that boy’s made off me since March?”
“Close to two thousand.”
“Every dollar of it. He signs his envelope every Saturday and leaves it in my drawer for somebody else to pick up.”
I held on to the cutting table.
“Somebody WHO, Joe?”
“She usually comes after he’s gone. Today she came early. She’s standing at my counter, and she asked me if you knew.”
“Knew WHAT?”
He let that one go by.
“You’d better get down here before he walks in from the back.”
I left my purse under the register.
It’s eleven minutes from the fabric store to Jung’s Tire. I made it in seven.
The bell over the door went when I pushed it.
Joe was behind the register with the phone still in his hand.
Kian was in the doorway to the bays, a tire leaning against his leg. He saw me, and every bit of color left him.
And at the counter, with his brown pay envelope flat under her hand, stood a woman in a gray cardigan.
She turned around.
I knew her face.
I’d looked across a courtroom at it for four days, a year and a half ago.
She’d sat in the second row, right behind the young man who walked away from my daughter’s car.
“WHAT IS SHE DOING WITH YOUR MONEY?”
Kian let the tire fall and stepped between us.
“Grandma, DON’T. You don’t know what she…”
The woman put her other hand over the envelope and said my name.
The second row
“Lois.”
Just that. Like she’d said it to herself the whole way over in the car.
I didn’t answer her. I looked past Kian at Joe.
“Joe. What is she doing with his money?”
Margo Haynes answered before he could.
“It goes to the pharmacy over on the far side of town,” she said. “Forty dollars every Saturday. It’s my son’s medicine. Andy’s.”
She said his name in Joe’s front office like it was anybody’s name.
Andy Haynes. Twenty-one when they tried him. Twenty-three now, if I’d ever let myself do that sum.
The tire Kian dropped rolled a half turn on the concrete and lay down.
On the radio somebody was playing an accordion like his life depended on it.
“Your son’s medicine,” I said.
“Grandma,” Kian said. “Let her finish. Please.”
“I’m not letting anybody finish anything.”
I put my hand out, palm up, for the envelope. The way I’d put it out to him at six for a pack of gum he’d taken off the rack at the checkout.
Margo didn’t move her hand.
“I told him to tell you,” she said. “In June I told him. In August I told him again. I said, your grandmother has a right to know where your pay is going, and he said you’d make him stop.”
“He’s right.”
“I know he’s right.” She looked at Kian then, and not at me. “He didn’t tell you about the letter, did he?”
The red pen
I keep a red felt-tip pen in my coat pocket. Thirty years of other people’s books, and that pen is where the mistakes go.
I had it in my pocket all four days of the trial.
It was at the courthouse in Hollidaysburg, in April, a year and a half ago. Andy Haynes, homicide by vehicle. He sat at the front table in a borrowed suit that was too big in the shoulders. His lawyer never once put him on the stand.
Margo sat behind him in the second row with a travel pack of tissues she never opened.
I sat across the aisle. Joe drove me the last day, in a tie I’d never seen him wear, and sat next to me with his hands on his knees.
The state trooper said black ice. The man from the county said the road hadn’t been salted. The jury was out for five hours and came back and said not guilty.
Andy Haynes walked out the side door with his mother’s hand on his back.
That’s the whole of what I knew about him.
The letters started that summer.
Plain white envelopes, my name on the front in handwriting that leaned over like it was tired. A return address on the far side of town. HAYNES above it.
There were three of them, about two months apart.
I didn’t open one. I stood at the end of the driveway each time and wrote RETURN TO SENDER across the front in red, in capitals, the way I’d mark a bad invoice, and I put it back in the box and put the flag up.
After the third one they stopped.
I never told Kian they came.
What I had of Tonia, I kept in my own head and in his face. She’d sold her bass the year he was born and put the money toward a crib. But she never stopped playing. She played on the steering wheel at red lights, her thumb going on the bottom of the wheel, and she’d say it to him over her shoulder when he was strapped in the back.
“Find the root, baby. Find the root and sit on it.”
He was five, and he’d say it back to her. Root and sit on it. Like it was a dirty word.
The coat was a men’s large from Boscov’s. Navy, with a hood. He was already taller than me, and I bought it a size up so it would last him two winters, and I paid it off five and ten dollars at a time until November.
The furnace in my house is older than Kian. There’s a quote taped on my refrigerator to replace it, three thousand one hundred dollars, and a savings passbook in my dresser that was getting there.
That was us. A boy, a bad furnace, a grandmother with a red pen.
In Joe’s front office, Kian was taking his wallet out of his back pocket.
Joe’s drawer
I didn’t wait to see what he wanted with it.
I reached past him and took the envelope out from under Margo’s hand.
She let it go. She didn’t fight me for it. That bothered me more than if she had.
His handwriting was on the front in pencil. For Mrs. Haynes. K. And a date.
“This is my grandson’s,” I said. “You can go.”
Joe put the phone back on its hook. He bent down, opened the drawer under the register and laid a stack of something on the counter.
Envelopes. The same brown pay envelopes, empty, flattened. Thirty of them, maybe. Every one in Kian’s pencil. For Mrs. Haynes. K.
“She brings them back to me empty,” Joe said. “Every week. She says she doesn’t want anything in her house with his name on it that she didn’t earn.”
“And you just kept handing them over.”
“He told me in March you knew.” Joe looked at Kian. “Didn’t you.”
Kian studied his boots.
“I should’ve called you in March,” Joe said. “I took his word. I had no reason not to. Then he came in here last Saturday without a coat in forty degrees, and I thought, no. She doesn’t know a thing.”
Margo had her hands in the pockets of the cardigan. She looked at the calendar on the wall behind Joe, a tire company calendar with a picture of a covered bridge on it, still turned to September.
“Where’s the coat, Kian?” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
Margo did.
“He came to my door in September,” she said. “Five o’clock, after his shift. He had it over his arm. He gave it to Andy and he went back down the steps before Andy could give it back.”
I turned the envelope over in my hands. Sixty-six dollars in it, if he’d worked his six hours. I didn’t need to open it.
I held it out to Kian.
“Put it in your pocket,” I said. “This is done. Whatever this is, it’s done today.”
He took it.
Then he turned around and set it down on the counter by Margo Haynes’s hand and took his hand off it.
“Then I’ll walk it over to her house myself,” he said. “Same as I did with the coat.”
Andy
Nobody in the room moved for a while.
On the radio the accordion stopped, and a man started selling gutter guards.
“He walked away,” I said to Margo. “I was there. Out the side door with your hand on his back.”
“He walked out of that building,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”
She took one hand out of her pocket and pressed the envelope flatter on the counter with two fingers, like it might lift off.
“I found him in the garage the Sunday after the verdict. What came after, I won’t say with the boy listening.”
I didn’t ask her to.
“They kept him at the hospital in Hollidaysburg three weeks. He lost his job at the warehouse while he was in there. The insurance went with the job. He’s on two prescriptions now, and with the discount card it comes to forty dollars a week. He sees a woman on Tuesdays, and she’s twenty-five a visit.”
Forty and twenty-five. Sixty-five. I did it without wanting to.
“I clean dental offices at night,” Margo said. “Four of them. I was making it. Mostly I was making it. And then in March your grandson came up my steps with an envelope.”
“How did he even know where you live?”
She looked at Kian.
He had the wallet open in his hand. He’d been holding it open this whole time.
“I asked him not to,” Margo said. “I told him to go home. I told him every week. I’d stand out in Joe’s lot at five o’clock with the envelope in my hand trying to make myself bring it back in and put it in the drawer.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t.” She said it straight at me. “My son goes to the pharmacy on foot, Lois. In a sweatshirt. He wouldn’t buy a coat. There was no making him. I bring the boy the receipts every week so he knows where every dollar went. That was the deal I could live with.”
The receipts. Gone soft in the wash, in his back pocket. Forty, forty, forty.
She’d been keeping his books for him.
“Why wouldn’t he buy a coat?” I said.
Margo opened her mouth, and then shut it, and looked at Kian again.
“Show her,” she said. “I’m not doing this part for you.”
Kian took the guitar pick out of the little window in his wallet, the gray one, Tonia’s, and set it on the counter by the envelope.
Behind it, folded down to the size of a stamp, was a letter.
The fourth letter
He unfolded it for me. It had been folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone furry.
Notebook paper. Both sides. The same tired handwriting from the three envelopes I’d written on in red.
At the top it didn’t say my name.
It said To Tonia’s son.
I didn’t sit down. Joe pushed his stool around the end of the counter with his foot, and I sat down on it anyway.
Nobody is making you read this. Your grandmother sends back my letters and I don’t blame her. I’m writing to you because I promised your mom something and I never did it, and the lawyer said not to tell anybody what she said that night or it would look like I was making it up.
I got to her car before the ambulance did. I slid on the ice getting there and got up. Her window was broken out. She was talking.
She said she was cold. I put my coat over her. It was a Carhartt. I don’t know why I remember that.
She asked me if I was okay. She asked ME that.
Then she asked me to tell her boy something, and I didn’t know your name, so she told me. Kian. She made me say it back to her twice.
She said tell Kian the picks are in the Folgers can in the garage, on the shelf over the paint.
And she said tell him find the root and sit on it. She said he’d know.
I stayed with her until they came. I’m sorry I didn’t say this in court. I’m sorry for everything. I’m not asking you for anything. I just couldn’t stand being the only one who knew she said your name.
Andy Haynes
I read it twice.
The second time I read it with my thumb going on the lip of Joe’s counter. I didn’t know I was doing it until Joe looked down at my hand.
Root and sit on it.
Nobody alive knew that but me and Kian. It wasn’t in any police report. It wasn’t anything a lawyer could make up. It was a thing a woman said at red lights to a five-year-old in a booster seat.
The Folgers can on the shelf over the paint. I’d walked past that shelf a hundred times in two winters.
“You found them because of this,” I said.
“I went out to the garage that night with a flashlight,” Kian said. “They were right where she said.”
“And the coat.”
“He gave his to her.” His voice went up on the end and he got it back down. “He never got it back. They cut it off her in the ambulance or something. He’s been walking around in a sweatshirt for two winters, Grandma.”
I turned the letter over. Up in the corner, in the same handwriting, there was a date.
March fourth.
“That’s the week you asked me for a job,” I said.
“That’s the week I asked Mr. Jung,” Kian said.
Return to sender
Margo had her purse on the counter. A cloth one with a broken clasp. She opened it and took something out and laid it on top of Joe’s pile of empty pay envelopes.
Three white envelopes. Sealed. Across the front of every one, in red felt-tip capitals, in my own hand: RETURN TO SENDER.
“He keeps them on his dresser,” she said. “In a row. He won’t let me throw them out.”
I didn’t touch them.
“You want to know why he wouldn’t buy a coat? Because he thought he didn’t get to have one. That’s what he told the woman on Tuesdays. Somebody’s mother froze in the road, and he gets to be warm? That’s how he thinks. That’s what four days in that room did to him.”
“Margo,” Joe said.
“No, Joe. I’ve stood in your lot thirty Saturdays. I get to say it once.”
She turned back to me.
“Four days you looked at me across that aisle like I was the one driving. I let you. I figured you’d earned it. I sat there and let you, and I’d have let you till I died. But you sent those back without opening one, and he had to go and write to a child. To a child, Lois. Because you wouldn’t.”
Kian said, “Mrs. Haynes.”
“And then the child came up my steps with his pay.” Her voice cracked on pay and she kept going over it. “I’m fifty-five years old. I’ve been taking a fourteen-year-old’s tire money behind his grandmother’s back since March, and I’m done. I asked Joe if you knew because I can’t do it one more Saturday. I came early today so I’d see your boy and give it back to him in person and tell him no. And instead I’m standing here with you.”
She picked the brown envelope up and held it out to Kian.
“Take it,” she said. “Buy your mother’s guitar. Andy will figure something out.”
Kian put his hands behind his back.
Nobody said anything. The man on the radio was still selling gutter guards.
I looked at the three envelopes with my writing on them.
I’d made that boy carry this by himself since March. A boy, a bus, a pharmacy across town, a lie for his grandmother every Saturday at four. Because of a red pen.
“Joe,” I said. “Lend me forty dollars. My purse is at the store.”
Joe opened the register without asking what for. He put two twenties on the counter.
I took the brown envelope out of Margo’s hand and put it in Kian’s.
“That’s yours,” I said to him.
I put the two twenties where it had been.
“That’s this week’s,” I said to Margo. “I’ll owe Joe.”
“I’m not taking your money either, Lois.”
“It isn’t for you. Take it to the pharmacy and hand it over the counter.”
She looked at it a long time.
“He gives twenty,” I said. “I give twenty. And the Tuesdays.”
“You can’t afford the Tuesdays,” Kian said. “You’ve got the furnace.”
“The furnace can wait a winter.”
Margo put the twenties in her purse, the way you’d put away something you were afraid would go off.
I picked the three white envelopes up off the pile. Then I put them in my coat pocket, in with the red pen.
“Tell him I’ll read these,” I said.
Margo nodded. She didn’t say anything else. She picked up her purse and went to the door and stopped with her hand on it.
“He wears that coat everywhere,” she said. “Even in the house.”
The bell over the door went when she pushed it.
A Saturday in February
The space heater was running by the stove. The furnace quote was still taped to the refrigerator, curling at one corner.
It was a Saturday. Ten after four.
The three letters lay opened out across the table, flattened under the sugar bowl, where they’d been since November. I’d read them so many times I could have typed them.
My book lay open by my elbow. Under H, in black pen, a column of twenties, one for every Saturday since October, and one line at the bottom for the Tuesdays.
The back door opened.
Kian came in with black in the creases of his knuckles that no soap would touch, and a soft gig bag over his shoulder that he’d bought off the music shop for twelve dollars extra.
He didn’t say a word. He set it on the kitchen table and unzipped it.
Cherry red. The chip out of the wood near the strap.
He took the gray pick out of his wallet.
He didn’t have an amp. He played one low note on it, unplugged, so quiet the space heater nearly covered it, and he let it ring and didn’t move.
“Root, Grandma,” he said. “Now I sit on it.”
I wrote the date at the top of a new page.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who still has a letter in a drawer they never opened.
For more stories about the kindness and secrets tucked into family life, read the tenant who asked whether Grandma’s husband had stopped by and the birthday stew brought to an empty dock. There’s also a tender story about a husband who filled his wife’s pill box every Sunday.
