Chapter 17: Three Weeks
Twenty-one dollars in twenty-one days.
That is a dollar a day, which sounds like nothing.
I want to explain why it was not nothing, without asking anybody to feel sorry about it.
Weekly income after tax was three hundred twenty-one dollars.
Ninety-five to Ivy on Friday.
Forty-two a month for the bus pass, which comes out of one week and ruins that week.
Sixteen a week for food I bought myself, because the house dinner is one meal and it is at six.
Eight dollars a month for the phone, prepaid, minimum to keep the number alive.
Laundry at the house is two dollars a load and I did one load a week.
Then the things that are not a category and never stop.
A tube of toothpaste. A pair of work socks. The six dollars I owed Yolanda from a week when I was short.
And the fund I did not tell anybody about.
Thirty dollars, untouched at all times, in case the house closed or Ivy's grant ran out and I had to move on a Thursday.
Everything left over was twelve to eighteen dollars a week, and out of that I had to make twenty-one in three.
Here is how I did it, and none of it is admirable, it is just arithmetic.
One. I did not renew the bus pass.
Two point four miles to Third Street. Forty-one minutes at my pace in June, thirty-eight by July.
That saved forty-two dollars in a month, which is more than the whole problem.
It cost me eighty-two minutes a day, which I had.
The route was Anselm to Route 6, Route 6 to Ninth, Ninth to Third.
Past the hardware store, where Gus put my application in and it came back a no, exactly as he said it would.
He waved at me through the glass most mornings. I waved back. That went on four months and neither of us ever said one word about it.
Past the Foodway. Past the check-cashing place that took three percent of me every other Friday.
Two. Marisol had a Saturday backlog and I asked for it.
Four hours on Saturday mornings, same rate, on top of my regular twenty-eight.
Fifty-four dollars before tax.
She said yes in one word and then said, “Don't make a habit of asking me for things on a Friday.”
Three. I stopped buying coffee at the place on Third, which was a dollar fifty, four days a week.
That is six dollars a week. That is more than a third of the problem.
I had been doing it eleven weeks without adding it up, which is a thing I would have caught in anybody else's ledger in nine seconds.
I am not perfect at this. I am just consistent.
Four. I sold the paperback dictionary at the used shop on Calloway for two dollars.
I had read all two hundred and six of its attached pages, twice, in the fourth year.
It went for two dollars and I took the two dollars. That is the one I minded.
Then, in the second week, the setback.
I came back from work on a Thursday and the sock was not in the locker.
I did not tear the room apart.
I sat down on the bottom bunk and thought about it for four minutes.
Trish took things. Everybody in that house knew Trish took things.
Socks, a lighter, a hair tie, a paperback.
And everybody knew the other half, which is that they came back in three days, and that if you said anything, they did not.
So I said nothing.
I went down to dinner and passed her the salt and asked her about her sister in Ohio, and she talked for eleven minutes.
Two days later the sock was back in the locker with nineteen dollars in it.
Folded the same way I fold, which she had noticed and copied.
I never mentioned it. Not once, not then, not on the day I left that house.
But I moved the money.
After that it lived in my left shoe at work, in a folded envelope under the insole.
I have kept money in a shoe ever since, in every apartment I have had, including this one.
On the third Friday I took the envelope out at the back-room table after Marisol left.
Ones, mostly. Two fives. A ten from the Saturday hours.
I counted it three times, the way you count when you already know.
Forty-one dollars and sixty cents.
Forty for the deposit.
A dollar sixty left over, which I spent the next morning on a coffee at the place on Third, standing up at the window, watching the courthouse.
I am not sorry about the coffee.
Monday morning I was at the top of the forty-one steps at 8:31, nine minutes before the office opened, with two copies of a form and two twenties in my hand.