My stepfather left his son Jimmy the house, the truck and the body shop, $640,000 in all, and left me a pine bread box he built in his garage. At the lawyer’s, Jimmy leaned over and said, “Guess Dad remembered whose kid you weren’t.” Two months later he came for Thanksgiving, saw that box by my stove, and went gray.
Mom married Burt when I was eleven.
She died nine years ago, and after that it was me driving him to dialysis three mornings a week.
Jimmy lived four hours north. He called on Burt’s birthday and on Christmas, and some years he forgot the birthday.
So when Mr. Kraus read the will out in his office in Joplin, I wasn’t expecting money.
I’d have been happy with the coffee mug from the shop.
The house went to Jimmy.
The truck went to Jimmy.
The shop, with its two lifts and the sign Burt repainted every spring, went to Jimmy.
Then Mr. Kraus turned a page and read, “To my daughter Shawna, the bread box from the garage shelf.”
Daughter.
Burt had never once written that word next to my name.
Jimmy laughed so hard Valencia had to put a hand on his arm.
“Should’ve brought her a sandwich to put in it,” he said.
I carried it out to the car myself and buckled it into the passenger seat.
It was plain pine, dovetailed at the corners, with a lid that slid in a groove. Burned into the top was a crooked sun with eleven rays.
I drew that sun in sixth grade. He’d copied it off our fridge.
Rodrigo wanted to fight it.
“Thirty-six years you showed up for that man,” he said. “A judge would see that.”
“I’m not suing anybody over a bread box,” I said.
I put it next to the stove, where anybody coming through the back door would see it before they saw me.
We kept the bread in it. Yuna kept her granola bars in the back corner and thought nobody knew.
Some mornings I touched the sun on the lid before I started the coffee.
In November Rodrigo said we should have Jimmy for Thanksgiving.
“He’s the only family Yuna’s got on that side,” he said.
So I set two more plates.
Jimmy showed up forty minutes late with a grocery store pie and Valencia in a fur vest.
He’d already listed Burt’s house. Mom’s rosebushes were in the listing photos.
He talked about the sale through the whole first plate. The shop was going to a chain for “a number you wouldn’t believe, Shawna.”
Then he got up for another beer and walked past the stove.
And stopped.
He put the bottle down on the counter without looking where it went.
“Where’d you get that,” he said.
“Your dad left it to me. You were sitting right there.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not the one off the garage shelf.”
He picked it up and weighed it in both hands like a sack of feed.
“It’s too heavy,” he said.
“There’s a loaf of rye in it, Jimmy.”
He dumped the rye on the counter.
Yuna’s granola bars went with it, all over the floor.
“Hey,” Yuna said. “Those are MINE.”
He didn’t even look at her. He turned the box over and ran his thumb along the bottom edge, slow, like he was reading something.
Rodrigo’s mother put her fork down.
Nobody at the table was chewing anymore.
“Dad built Mom one of these,” Jimmy said. “Same sun. He told me he got rid of hers.”
“PUT IT BACK,” I said.
“I’m taking it.”
“You got the HOUSE. You got the TRUCK. You got the SHOP.”
“This was my mother’s,” he said.
“It has MY drawing on it.”
Valencia said, “Jimmy, people are watching you.”
He tucked the box under his arm and headed for the front door.
Rodrigo got there first.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood in it.
“Move,” Jimmy said.
“Not with that,” Rodrigo said.
So Jimmy set the box on the hall table, right there in front of all of us, and pressed hard on one of the dovetails with his thumb.
A thin drawer slid out of the bottom.
I’d washed that box a dozen times. I never knew it was there.
Inside was a credit union passbook with SHAWNA printed across the front in Burt’s block capitals.
Jimmy opened it to the last page and his whole face went slack.
“He SWORE to me he closed this,” he said.
The hall table
I took it out of his hand.
He let me. That should have scared me more than it did.
The last page was a column of purple stamps, one under the other, little dates down the left side and numbers down the right. Fridays. I didn’t know yet that they were Fridays. I just knew the dates went on and on, down to this past September.
At the bottom of the balance column it said $71,880.45.
I read it twice. The second time I read it out loud, which was a mistake.
From the dining room Rodrigo’s mother, Fernanda, said, “Dios mío.”
Valencia said, “How much?”
And Jimmy took it back.
He didn’t grab. He just reached out and lifted it off my palm the way you’d lift a fork off a kid’s plate, and before I could close my hand he had it folded into the chest pocket of his tan quarter-zip. He ran the zipper up to the top.
I heard every tooth of that zipper.
“That’s Dad’s money,” he said.
“It’s got my name on it.”
“It’s got your name on the outside.” He patted the pocket. “What’s inside is Dad’s. And everything that was Dad’s is mine. You sat right there in Kraus’s office and heard it.”
Rodrigo was still in the front door. He looked at me over Jimmy’s shoulder like he was waiting for a number to call.
“Give it back to her,” Rodrigo said.
“Or what?” Jimmy said. “You gonna frisk me on Thanksgiving, Rodrigo? In front of your mother?”
I thought about it. I want that on the record. I stood in my own front hall in my good cobalt sweater with gravy on the cuff and I measured Jimmy the way he’d measured that box, and I decided I could get the zipper down before he got his elbow up.
Then Yuna said, “Mom?”
She was on her knees in the kitchen doorway with an armful of granola bars, the crinkly kind, and she was looking at me like I was about to do something she’d tell her friends about.
So I didn’t.
Jimmy saw me not do it. He smiled.
He walked back to the dining room and sat down in my chair, at the head of my table, in front of my plate.
“Pie,” he said. “Somebody cut the pie.”
Fridays on Main Street
Burt had dialysis Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at seven in the morning, at a clinic by the hospital that smelled like hand soap and burnt coffee.
On Fridays, on the way home, he had me stop at the credit union on Main.
Every Friday. Nine years. Snow, heat, the week of the tornado sirens, the Friday his blood pressure dropped so low they made him sit an extra hour. “Main Street,” he’d say, before I’d even pulled out of the lot.
He had a white envelope in his jacket with SHOP written on it in block capitals. Burt wrote everything in block capitals. Grocery lists. Birthday cards. The note on the fridge that said OUT OF MILK, which Mom kept up there for a month after she bought milk because she thought it was funny.
“I can run it in for you,” I said, that first Friday.
“No.”
“Burt, you can barely stand up.”
“I can stand up to the window,” he said. “That’s the shop’s loan. That’s my business.”
So I sat in the car with the radio on and watched him go in, one hand on the rail, and come out ten minutes later putting the envelope back in his jacket, empty.
He’d get in. He’d buckle. And then every single Friday he’d pull two twenties out of his wallet, folded the long way, and hold them out over the gear shift.
“For gas,” he said.
“I’m not taking gas money.”
“It’s forty miles round trip, three times a week. I did the math.”
“I’m not taking gas money from my dad,” I said.
That was the first time I ever called him that. It just came out. I was thirty-eight years old and I said it like a kid says a swear word, to see if it works.
Burt looked out his window at the bank across the street for a long time.
Then he put the twenties back in his wallet and said, “Then I’ll put it somewhere you can’t argue with it.”
I thought he meant church. I said, “Fine,” and drove us home.
He offered every Friday after that. Two twenties, the long way. I said no every Friday. It got to be a bit between us, like a knock-knock joke where nobody says who’s there.
I should tell you about the two weeks before that first Friday.
When Mom died, I put her funeral on my Visa because there wasn’t any insurance. Mom always said insurance was for people who planned to die, and she didn’t. Burt wanted to pay me back. I told him we’d talk about it. We never did.
Jimmy drove down for the service. Afterward, he said Burt should come stay with him for a while, up in Maryville, “get out of this house.” It was the first nice thing I’d ever heard Jimmy offer anybody. He set Burt up at a dialysis place up there and everything.
Burt came home after two weeks, eight pounds lighter.
He wouldn’t talk about it. I asked how Jimmy’s was, and he said, “Big TV,” and that was all I ever got.
That spring Jimmy bought a boat. A real one, for the lake, with a little cabin under the front.
He named it LAURA, after Mom.
I’m going to be honest with you. When Valencia posted that picture, the boat with Mom’s name on the back in gold letters, I cried in the Walmart parking lot. I thought, all right. Maybe he did love her. She did raise him from fourteen. Maybe that’s what Jimmy’s love looks like, a boat.
Jimmy was always a finder, growing up. That was his one talent. Christmas presents, Mom’s cigarettes, the key to Burt’s gun cabinet, the twenty I hid in my jewelry box. He found everything in that house except a reason to be nice to me.
I sat down at my own table that Thanksgiving in the chair Jimmy had left, which was the one by the window, which was Yuna’s.
Yuna sat on Rodrigo’s knee.
And I looked at the zipper on Jimmy’s chest and thought about nine years of Fridays.
Valencia’s checkbook
Nobody cut the pie.
Fernanda folded her napkin into a square, then a smaller square. She’d come up from Carthage for the day. She worked thirty-one years at the teller window of a bank there before she retired, and she still read a receipt like other people read a menu, slow, with her glasses down her nose.
“Jimmy,” she said. “With respect. A book with a name on the front belongs to the name.”
“With respect, Fernanda,” Jimmy said, “you don’t know my family.”
“I know a passbook.”
“Then you know a man doesn’t hide money from his own daughter in a drawer.” He leaned back in my chair. “He hides it from his son. Or he hides it because it isn’t hers. Which one, Shawna?”
I didn’t have an answer. That was the worst part. I’d washed that box a dozen times.
Valencia was picking the pecans off her slice of nothing. She hadn’t taken pie. She’d just moved a pecan from the serving plate to her own plate so she’d have something to do with her hands.
“You know what the funny thing is?” Jimmy said. “Dad never could keep his paperwork straight. Kraus told me that. Had a drawer full of stuff from the shop, loans, liens, half of it in the wrong folders. The chain had me go through every page of it. They want it clean. Closing’s December fifteenth and they want it clean, nothing hanging off it, or they walk.”
“Jimmy,” Valencia said.
“What? I’m saying he was a mess. This is a mess.” He tapped the zipper. “Monday I call Kraus. I’m the executor. It’s estate money, it goes in the estate, and the estate is me.”
Rodrigo said, “That’s not how that works.”
“You a lawyer now, Rodrigo? You fix air conditioners.”
Rodrigo did fix air conditioners. He’d fixed Burt’s, twice, for free, in August.
I tried to do it the calm way. I’ll give myself that. I put both my hands flat on the tablecloth.
“Jimmy. I saw the dates on that page. Those were Fridays.”
“Okay.”
“Those are the days I drove him. He went in to the window every Friday after dialysis. He said it was the shop’s loan.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said again, and smiled like I’d handed him something. “So every Friday after you drove him, he went in and put money in a book with your name on it.”
“Yes.”
“Shawna.” He laughed. “That’s a paycheck.”
Valencia laughed too, a little, through her nose, and then looked at Fernanda and stopped.
“That’s what that is,” Jimmy said. “He was paying his driver. He just didn’t want to do the tax on it. And now his driver wants seventy-one thousand dollars for a few rides to the clinic.”
“Nine years,” I said.
“Lot of rides.” He shrugged. “Lot of gas.”
Valencia set the pecan down. She reached into her purse, the little one with the gold chain, and she came out with a checkbook. Valencia was the last woman in Missouri who still wrote checks at the grocery store. I’d stood behind her once at the Price Cutter while she did it and I thought the cashier was going to retire right there at the register.
“Look,” she said. “Nobody’s saying you didn’t help. You helped. So let’s just take care of that.”
“Valencia,” Rodrigo said.
“No, it’s fine, I want to.” She clicked her pen. “For the gas.”
She wrote. She signed. She tore it off along the little dotted line, slow, so it didn’t rip, and she leaned across Yuna and laid it on my plate.
It landed in the gravy.
I picked it up by the corner.
Pay to the order of Shawna. Five hundred dollars and no cents. In the memo line, in pretty round letters, she’d written GAS.
Six rays
I tore it in half. Then in half again. Then I put the pieces back on my plate and pushed the plate away.
“Okay,” Jimmy said. “Okay. That’s how you want it.”
“I want my box back on my counter,” I said. “And I want what’s in your pocket.”
“You can have the box when I’m dead.”
He got up. He walked out of the dining room into the hall, where the box was still sitting on the little table by the front door with its drawer hanging out like a tongue.
Rodrigo stood up. So did I. So did Yuna, who climbed right off Rodrigo’s knee and ran past all three of us, because she’s eleven and fast and nobody tells her anything.
She got to the hall table first. She put both hands flat on the lid.
“Grandpa made it,” she said. “Grandpa made it for MOM.”
Jimmy stopped.
I’ll say this for him. He didn’t touch her. He stood over her with his big hands hanging and his face red from the beer and the pie he didn’t eat, and he said, “Go sit down, sweetheart.”
“No.”
“Yuna,” I said. “Come here, baby.”
She came. She came backward, keeping her eyes on him, and she stood against my hip, and I put my hand on her hair. She was shaking. She was mad, not scared. Yuna shakes when she’s mad.
Jimmy picked up the box. He pushed the drawer shut with his thumb. Click.
“This was Mom’s,” he said. “She kept it in her closet. On the shelf, under her sweaters. You know how I know that?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Because I was there,” he said. “I lived in that house too. I called her Mom too. For twenty-seven years I called her Mom and you never once let me forget she wasn’t.”
That stopped me. I’ll admit it stopped me. I looked for a lie in it and I couldn’t find one fast enough.
“So I’m taking Mom’s box,” he said. “You can have your seventy-one thousand. Fight me for it. But this goes home with me.”
“It’s got my drawing on it, Jimmy.”
“Your drawing.”
“I was eleven.”
“Then keep your drawing,” he said.
He slid the lid out of its groove. It came out smooth, the way it always did, the way I’d slid it a thousand mornings to get at the bread.
He put it across his knee.
Rodrigo said, “Jimmy, DON’T,” and moved, and I put my arm out and stopped him, because Yuna was right there against my hip and I wasn’t going to have my husband in a fistfight in my front hall on Thanksgiving in front of my daughter. That’s the only thing I’m proud of from that afternoon.
Pine is soft. It didn’t take much.
It made a sound like a stick at a campfire.
The crack went straight through the middle of the sun, the way the grain ran. Burt would have known it would go that way. Burt knew wood.
Jimmy held out one of the pieces to me.
I took it. I don’t know why I took it. You just take what somebody hands you.
He’d kept the bigger half for himself. Mine was the half with six rays on it.
Forty dollars
Fernanda was the one who got Yuna into the kitchen. I heard her in there saying something in Spanish, low and steady, and the crinkle of granola bar wrappers being stacked.
I put my half of the lid on the dining room table, sun side up. I didn’t know what else to do with it.
Jimmy came back in and set the box and his half of the lid next to his plate, like he’d won them at a fair. He sat back down in my chair.
“Now,” he said. “Since we’re all being honest.”
He unzipped the pocket. He took the passbook out and opened it to the last page and turned it so it faced the table.
“Let’s read it,” he said. “Since Shawna wants everybody to know what a good daughter she was.”
“Jimmy, stop,” Valencia said. “Let’s just go.”
“No, no. Let’s read it.” He ran his finger down the column. “September eighteenth. Forty dollars. September eleventh. Forty dollars. September fourth. Forty dollars.”
He looked up at me.
“Forty,” he said. “Forty. Forty. Forty.”
Every Friday, the long way, over the gear shift. Then I’ll put it somewhere you can’t argue with it.
My face did something. I felt it go. I’d been all right through the rye and the check in the gravy and the lid across his knee, and it was the forties that got me. Because he was right that it was gas money. And he was wrong about every single other thing, and there was no way to say that out loud at a table without crying, so I cried instead.
Not pretty. I don’t cry pretty. I cry like a dog that got shut out of the house.
“There it is,” Jimmy said.
“You ought to be ashamed,” Rodrigo said.
“Of what? She’s the one who got paid.” Jimmy turned pages backward with his thumb, quick, not reading. “Here. August. Forty, forty, forty. Some months there’s a couple hundred. One time, four thousand, that’s April, that’s the spring the shop did the hail cars, I remember that. So the shop paid her too. Great. That’s Dad’s business money, sitting in a book. That’s the estate.”
“It’s her name,” Fernanda said from the kitchen doorway.
“And Monday it’s frozen,” Jimmy said. “Kraus sends a letter, the credit union holds it till the estate’s settled. You want it, you hire a lawyer. You go ahead and hire a lawyer, Shawna, on whatever Rodrigo makes doing ductwork, and you sue me. By the time a judge hears it, I’ll be at the lake.”
He closed the book.
“And you know what the judge is gonna see? Forty dollars. Every Friday. A driver.”
He tossed it.
It slid across the tablecloth, past the gravy boat, past the green beans nobody ate, and stopped against the pieces of Valencia’s check on my plate.
“Go on,” he said. “Read it yourself. Read the whole thing. Read how much he loved you.”
I couldn’t. My eyes weren’t working. I put my hand over it and I just sat there.
Fernanda came and stood behind my chair. She put one hand on my shoulder. With the other she slid the passbook out from under my fingers, and she pushed her glasses down her nose, and she started at the back and turned forward, one page at a time.
She was doing it the way she did it at the window for thirty-one years. Slow. Lips moving a little on the numbers.
Jimmy said, “Fernanda, it’s not your business.”
She didn’t answer him. She turned a page. She turned another. She went back one.
Then she stopped and held the book closer to the light from the window.
“Who,” she said, “banks in Maryville?”
The stamp from Maryville
Nobody answered her.
Fernanda set the passbook down flat in front of me and put her finger on one line, the way she used to put her finger on the line where you sign.
“Here,” she said. “Read it, mija.”
It was near the top of a page in the middle of the book. Every other stamp on that page, and the page before it, and the page after, was purple and said JOPLIN in tiny letters down the side. This one was blue. Different machine. It said MARYVILLE.
November 6, 2017.
A withdrawal. Fifty-two thousand, six hundred eleven dollars and thirty-eight cents.
The balance after it was five dollars.
I looked at the date for a long time. Mom died in October that year. The second week of November was the two weeks.
“Five dollars,” Fernanda said. “You know what that is? You can’t take a share account below five dollars without closing it. To close it you fill out a card. You sign it. Whoever did this took everything but the five dollars and did not sign the card.” She tapped the stamp. “Somebody wanted it to look closed and keep it open.”
She turned one page forward.
The next stamp was purple again. Joplin. The first Friday after Burt came home from Jimmy’s. Forty dollars.
The first Friday I said dad.
I looked at Jimmy.
He was looking at the book. Not at me. At the book, the way he’d looked at the bottom of the box, like it was reading him back.
“You took him to Maryville,” I said.
“He wanted to go.”
“You took him to your credit union two weeks after Mom’s funeral.”
“It’s a shared branch, any of them can do it, it’s not—” He stopped. “He wanted to go, Shawna. It was his money.”
“What was?”
He opened his mouth. Then he shut it.
Valencia was sitting very still. She’d been holding the gold chain of her purse the whole time and now she let go of it, and it slid off the table edge and hit the floor, and nobody picked it up.
“November,” Valencia said.
“Val.”
“That’s the November we got the boat.”
“Val, not now.”
“You said that money was from your mom. You said your mom left you something and you didn’t want Shawna to know because it would hurt her feelings.” She turned in her chair to look at him straight on. “You said it was Laura’s life insurance.”
I wiped my face with my napkin. It had cranberry on it. I didn’t care.
“Mom didn’t have life insurance,” I said. “I put her funeral on my Visa.”
The other check
Jimmy stood up so fast the chair went over behind him.
“It WAS Mom’s,” he said. “It was Mom’s money. She opened that account, you know that? She opened it the year she married Dad. Eleven dollars. For your stupid sun. I was fifteen and I found it, I found that box in her closet and I found the drawer and I found the book with your name on it, and you know whose name wasn’t on any book? Mine. MINE. Nobody in that house was saving a dime for me. I had to buy my own truck. I bought my own truck at seventeen with money from bagging groceries and you got a book in a drawer.”
Nobody said anything. He kept going. He had a lot.
“And then she died. And I came down here and I opened that closet and it was still there, and it was FIFTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS, Shawna, she’d been putting in that whole time, out of the grocery money, out of Dad’s money, and I thought, no. No. She’s gone and he’s gonna leave her that, and the shop, and the house, and I’m gonna get a Christmas card. So I took him up to my place. Yeah. I did. And I sat with him. And I said, Dad, she’s not your kid. She’s got a husband. She’s got a house. I’m your SON. And he cried in my truck in the parking lot, okay, he cried, and then he went in and he took it out and he gave it to me and he said it was closed.”
He pointed at the book.
“He SWORE to me. He swore it was closed. He said he got rid of the box. He said he’d make it right with me in the will and he DID, didn’t he? Didn’t he? I got the house. I got the shop. Everybody heard Kraus. I got it all, because I’m his son, and you got a BREAD BOX.”
“He wrote daughter,” I said.
That was all I said. I didn’t plan it. Jimmy looked at me like I’d thrown something.
Rodrigo’s chair scraped. He came around the table and stood next to me, not in front of me, next to me, which is the right place for a husband to stand and he knows it.
“Thirty-six years,” Rodrigo said to Jimmy. “I told her a judge would see that. A judge would see this too.”
“There’s no judge,” Jimmy said. “It’s a family thing. It’s done. It was nine years ago.”
“It’s got a stamp on it,” Fernanda said.
“Stay out of it.”
“I was a teller for thirty-one years. A stamp is a stamp.”
Jimmy turned around in a circle. Like a man in a parking lot who can’t find his car. He looked at the box on the table and the half of the lid by his plate and my half of the lid by mine.
“You file on me,” he said, “and you know what happens? You tie up the estate. You tie up the shop. The chain walks. They told me, any lawsuit, any claim, anything hanging off it, they walk. You want to do that to Dad’s shop? His sign? You want some stranger to buy it for parts?”
I didn’t answer. I reached across the table and picked up Valencia’s checkbook, where she’d left it by the pecans. It had gravy on the corner from where the first check had been.
I set it down in front of Valencia. I opened it to the next blank check.
“Fifty-two thousand, six hundred eleven dollars and thirty-eight cents,” I said.
Valencia looked at the check. Then at me.
“And Mom’s roses,” I said. “All four of them. Before the house closes.”
“Oh, come ON,” Jimmy said. “Come on. That’s insane. That’s the whole boat. That’s more than the boat. We’ll give you ten. Fifteen. Val, tell her fifteen.”
Valencia didn’t say anything.
“Twenty,” Jimmy said. “Twenty, and you keep the seventy-one, and we all walk away. That’s fair. Rodrigo, tell her that’s fair.”
“It’s her number,” Rodrigo said.
“It’s not her number, it’s MY number, that’s what I TOOK—”
He heard it. Everybody heard it. Yuna heard it from the kitchen doorway with a granola bar in each hand.
He sat down. Not in my chair, that was on the floor. On the arm of the couch in the living room, through the doorway, like a teenager who got sent out.
“And Monday,” I said, “you call Mr. Kraus. You tell him the book’s mine. You tell him the estate’s got no claim.”
“Or what?”
“His number’s on my fridge,” I said. “The chain’s closing is the fifteenth.”
That was it. That was all I had. I didn’t have a lawyer. I had a stamp, and Fernanda, and the fifteenth.
Jimmy put his face in his hands.
Valencia picked up her pen.
“Val,” Jimmy said through his fingers. “Val, don’t. It’s the joint account. Val, that’s ours.”
“It was never ours,” Valencia said. “That’s the whole thing, Jimmy. You let me put her name on the back of that boat.”
She wrote it out in those round letters. Fifty-two thousand, six hundred eleven and 38/100. She wrote it in words on the long line and didn’t make one mistake. In the memo line she didn’t write anything.
She signed it.
She tore it off slow, along the dotted line, so it didn’t rip, and handed it to me. Not on the plate. In my hand.
“I’m sorry about the gas,” she said.
Then she stood up and put on her fur vest and picked her purse up off the floor.
“Get the box,” Jimmy said. “At least get Mom’s box.”
“It’s hers,” Valencia said. “Get in the car.”
Jimmy got up off the arm of the couch. He walked through my dining room past all of us, past Fernanda, past Rodrigo, past my daughter, and he stopped at the table and looked at his half of the lid.
He left it.
He went out into the hall, and Rodrigo walked ahead of him and opened the front door wide and stood beside it this time instead of in it.
“Now you can go,” Rodrigo said.
Valencia came back in thirty seconds later for the grocery store pie.
Six and five
After the taillights went around the corner, I sat on the floor of my own kitchen with my back against the dishwasher and cried until Yuna got worried and brought me a granola bar.
Not one of the ones from the floor. A clean one. From her stash in the pantry. I didn’t know she had a second stash.
“You can have it,” she said. “Don’t tell.”
I ate it. Peanut butter. It was the best thing I ate all Thanksgiving, and I’d made a twenty-two-pound turkey.
Rodrigo got the wood glue from the garage and two clamps and we sat at the kitchen counter, the three of us, with the two halves of the lid between us. Fernanda did the dishes and wouldn’t let anybody help.
The halves fit back together almost perfect. Pine does that. It breaks along the grain, so it knows where it came from.
“Six and five,” Yuna said, counting rays with her finger. “Six on yours and five on his.”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Eleven,” she said. “Like you were.”
Rodrigo ran a line of glue down the break and pressed the halves together and tightened the clamps a quarter turn at a time, slow, the way he does on a compressor bracket. A little glue squeezed out of the crack, right through the middle of the sun, and he wiped it with his thumb.
“There’ll be a line,” he said.
“I know.”
“I can sand it.”
“Leave the line,” I said.
Fernanda dried her hands and came and looked at it over my shoulder. She put her hand on the back of my neck, the way you do a kid with a fever.
“Your stepfather,” she said, “was a very stubborn man.”
“He was my dad,” I said.
I said it out loud in my own kitchen. I’d only ever said it to him, the once, in the car, over two twenties. It felt like a word I’d been carrying in my pocket for nine years and finally put down on the counter.
Yuna fished her floor granola bars out of the trash where Fernanda had put them and wiped each one off on her sweatshirt and lined them up by the stove.
“They’re still good,” she said. “They’re wrapped.”
The next morning I took the clamps off. The line ran straight through the sun, thin and dark, between the fifth ray and the sixth.
I slid the lid back into its groove. It went smooth.
I put a new loaf of rye in it, and Yuna’s granola bars in the back corner, and I set it next to the stove.
The window on Main
The Friday after Thanksgiving I drove to the credit union on Main by myself and parked in the same spot.
I sat there a minute with the radio off.
Then I went in to the window with the passbook and Valencia’s check, and a young man with a tie clip stamped the book in purple. JOPLIN down the side.
$52,611.38 in.
The balance under it said $124,491.83.
The check cleared on Tuesday.
Jimmy called Mr. Kraus on Monday at 9:10 in the morning. Mr. Kraus called me at 9:40 to tell me the estate was making no claim on any account in my name and to ask, carefully, if everything was all right. I said it was.
Saturday, Rodrigo and I took his work truck to Burt’s house and dug up Mom’s four rosebushes, roots and all, in a cold drizzle, while the realtor’s sign creaked in the yard. They’re along my back fence now. Two of them made it through the winter. The other two I’m still watering in case.
The listing photos changed that week. The new ones have four holes in the side yard.
The shop closed to the chain on December fifteenth, on time. Burt’s sign came down the next day. Rodrigo drove by and bought it off the crew for eighty dollars and a case of Dr Pepper, and it’s in our garage, and every spring I repaint it.
Valencia listed the boat the first week of December.
It sold in February for $24,500 to a man from Kansas City. He painted over the name.
Valencia sends Yuna a card now, on her birthday. It comes from an apartment in Maryville with only Valencia’s name on the envelope.
Jimmy sent me one text, on Christmas Eve, a little after eleven at night.
You were never his.
I took a picture of the front of the passbook, with SHAWNA across it in block capitals, and sent that back.
He didn’t answer.
Some mornings I still touch the sun on the lid before I start the coffee. I put my finger right on the line.
If you’ve got somebody who drove you to every appointment and never once took the gas money, call them this week and tell them they’re yours.
Family money and old grudges have a way of surfacing at the worst moments – see what happened when a father’s birthday cake hid his daughter’s house money, or when a mother made it clear which son she considered her “real” one.
