Chapter 43: The Envelope
At eleven twenty-eight she took an envelope out of her handbag and put it on the table between us.
White. Business size. Not sealed, the flap folded in.
She put two fingers on it and slid it about four inches, which is a distance that means she wanted me to see it move.
She said, “This is nothing. Don't make it into something.”
I said, “How much is it?”
She said, “Three hundred.”
The flap was folded in, so the notes were visible at the edge. Six fifties, or five fifties and five twenties, which is a different shape.
Six fifties. You can tell by the stack thickness. I had spent three months handling cash across a counter. Fifties sit differently. They have not been folded as much.
I said, “Where's it from?”
She said, “Me. It's from me.”
I said, “All right.”
I did not touch it. It sat there for twenty-one more minutes.
She said, “You could get a coat.”
That is the sentence I have thought about most, out of everything anybody said to me that year.
She had looked at me for thirty-eight minutes and the thing she had noticed was correct.
I did not have a coat. I had a jacket from the thrift shop that was not going to do December.
I had been costing that coat for five weeks. Thirty-eight dollars at the thrift shop, forty-five new on sale.
Being seen accurately by a person you cannot trust is a specific experience and I did not have a word for it then.
She said, “Bree would like to see you.”
I said, “No.”
She said, “She's not what you think.”
I said, “I don't think anything. I've had one conversation with her in six years and it lasted four minutes.”
She said, “That was a difficult day for everybody.”
I let that one go past. There was no version of taking it up that ended anywhere.
Then she said, “She has some of your mother's things put away safe. For you.”
I said, “She's wearing one of them.”
Renata's face did a thing that I have never been able to file properly.
It was not guilt and it was not surprise. It was closer to correction, the way you look when somebody has misread a chart.
She said, “She wears it for you.”
I did not answer that.
I want to record that I did not raise my voice, did not stand up, and did not touch her, and that this took effort, and that the effort was mostly in my hands.
I put my hands flat on my knees under the table, which is where I put them.
She talked for another eleven minutes. The baby, the hip, a cousin on her husband's side who had moved away.
At eleven fifty-two I stood up and put my chair in.
The envelope was still there. She had not moved it and neither had I.
She said, “Take it. Please.”
I said, “Thank you for the coffee.”
That is what I said. Not a speech. Four ordinary words, and I meant them, because she had bought the coffee.
I have never in my life wanted three hundred dollars the way I wanted it at eleven fifty-two on that Saturday.
Three hundred dollars was a coat and a month of bus and a table for a room I did not have.
I walked out and turned left because left is the way to Cranmore. It is also the long way, and I knew that when I turned.
Through the window, from the pavement, you can see that table.
I did not stop and I did not stare. I looked, the way you look at a shop, walking.
She had the envelope in her hand and she was putting it back in the bag.
She was also, at the same time, waving at the girl behind the counter for the bill, and she had her card out.
Both things at once, smoothly, without any expression on her face at all.
That is the picture I kept. Not the wrist and not the coffee. That.
I got to Cranmore at twelve-forty.
My chore that week was the downstairs bathroom. Toilet, basin, floor, mirror, bin.
I did it properly, which takes thirty-five minutes if you move the bin and do behind it, and most people do not move the bin.
Ms. Prine came past at one-fifteen and looked in and said, “You did behind the bin.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Nobody does behind the bin.”
Then she went away and I finished the mirror and put everything back in the cupboard with the labels facing out.
That night I got the file out from under the bunk and held it on my knees and did not open it.
Then I put it back.
Eleven days later Dean came to the office on Kesler Street.