Chapter 28: Eighty-One Dollars
A single ride was two dollars seventy-five. Cash. Exact change. Two rides a day, five days a week. Twenty-seven fifty a week.
At twenty-two working days in the month, one hundred and twenty-one dollars.
A thirty-one-day pass was eighty-one.
Forty dollars a month is the difference.
Forty dollars was most of what I had left over in a good week.
The catch is the shape of it. You cannot pay eighty-one dollars in instalments.
The machine wants it at once, in bills, and it does not give change above five.
So the pass is cheaper only if you already have the money.
That is the whole design of being poor, and I do not say it bitterly. It is how the arithmetic sits.
I did the sum in the notebook on a Sunday night with the golf pencil.
To get eighty-one clear dollars in one place, I had to stop paying two seventy-five twice a day.
Cranmore House to Kesler Street is two point four miles.
I measured it on the library map with a piece of string against the scale bar.
Two point four miles is forty-eight minutes at the pace I walk.
I know because I timed it against the clock over the office door and Marisol's wall clock at the far end.
That meant leaving at 6:35 instead of 7:05.
Which meant rising at 5:55, which meant losing my bathroom slot.
Which meant trading with Yaz for 5:40, which meant a dollar a week, entered under WHAT FOR as BATHROOM.
I walked for nine working days.
The route is Cranmore to Delham, left at Delham, along the park fence, under the rail bridge, then eleven blocks of Kesler.
Delham Street is the street the house was on.
I walked past it every morning for nine days.
The new people had put a bench out front.
Green metal, the kind that comes in a flat box and takes an evening to assemble, facing the road.
I did not slow down and I did not speed up.
I looked at it the way you look at a parked car.
Under the rail bridge there is standing water on the left that never dries.
There is a strip of dry concrete eight inches wide against the wall.
Nine days, twice a day, eighteen passes along eight inches of dry concrete.
My shoulder wore a mark on the brickwork. I noticed it on the seventh day.
The shoes were the problem.
I came out in canvas slip-ons issued by the state.
Canvas is not a thing you put four point eight miles a day into.
By day three the seam had opened along the outside of the right foot.
By day five my little toe was through it.
I bought a pair at the thrift shop on Kesler for fourteen dollars.
Brown leather, low heel, women's eight, worn at the back of the left one by somebody who walked like I do.
They gave me a blister the size of a thumbprint under the right heel on the first afternoon.
Moleskin at the dollar store was a dollar seventy-nine for six patches.
I used two a day for four days and made the sheet last.
I complained to nobody. That was not strength.
There was nobody in that building whose week was easier than mine.
On the ninth day I counted the notebook.
Forty-nine fifty saved in fares, twelve dollars held back from lunches, twenty-two carried in from the fortnight before.
Eighty-three dollars and fifty cents, in a folded envelope, inside a sock, inside the locker.
I took eighty-one of it to the transit centre on Saturday morning.
The machine is a grey box with a dead pixel in the top left corner and a slot that takes bills one at a time.
It rejected two of my ones, twice each.
I flattened them on the edge of the machine with my thumb and fed them again, and the second time it took them.
Then it made the noise it makes and printed a card.
Thin plastic, orange and white, magnetic stripe, transit authority logo, the words 31-DAY UNLIMITED.
Along the bottom edge, in small dot-matrix type, it printed the expiry date.
I stood at the machine and read it. Then I turned the card over. Then I read it again.
Then I put it in my back pocket and walked out into the car park.
That was when I understood I had spent every dollar I had on the ability to sit down.
I rode the bus that afternoon for no reason. One stop past Kesler and back.
It cost me nothing, because it was already paid for, and that was the entire point.
On Monday I gave Yaz her dollar anyway. She looked at me, put it in her shoe, and said nothing.
I kept the shoes. They lasted fourteen months. The blister scar under my right heel is still there.