“No, ma’am,” he said. “She never did.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Mrs. Albrecht. She did not say it meanly. “I’m not telling you what to do, Dennis. I never could tell you anything. I’m only the one who asks.”
And she walked on up the row to see about the pies.
My brother stood there. I have known that face since it had no front teeth. He was adding something up, and it was not the hospital: Dad’s shelves, and the peach truck, and a card table by a church basement door that he had walked past for twenty years.
He picked up the cash box by its handle.
He came around the end of his table, past his wife, and walked the six feet, and set it down on the red checked cloth between the tin box and Shirley’s jar. It made a small flat clank. It was eleven forty by the bank sign.
“There’s four hundred sixty-six dollars in there that’s hers,” he said. He said it loud enough to carry. He meant it to. “And forty in change that’s ours, that we came with. We sold a hundred thirty-two last week and forty-seven this morning. That’s a hundred seventy-nine jars. Seven hundred sixteen dollars.”
“Dennis.”
“Let me finish, Jude, I’ve been adding it for ten minutes.” He swallowed. “Pam mailed two hundred fifty to the hospital Monday. So it’s short. It’s two hundred fifty short, and I haven’t got it today. I’ll have it by Christmas. Fifty a week. You can write that down, you’re the bookkeeper.”
“I’m not taking it.”
“I’m not asking you to take it. It’s not yours, any more than it was mine.” His voice went rough. “I’m asking you where she’d have put it. You’re the one who’d know. I never went down there either.”
“Second and fourth Thursday,” I said. “Church basement. Jean keeps a coffee can.”
He nodded. He opened the box, right there, and took out two twenties and handed them to Pam, and shut it again and left it on my table.
Then he turned around to the people. This is the part I had not expected of him and will not forget.
“The rest of these aren’t for sale,” my brother said to the courthouse square. “They never were. If you bought one off me, you don’t owe anybody a thing. You eat it and be glad. Just bring the jar back.”
“Washed,” said Shirley Peterson.
“Washed,” said Dennis.
Somebody laughed, and then a good many people did. Hank walked across to space thirteen without a word and took one end of a crate. My brother took the other. They started loading the pyramids back into the pickup, a hundred and twenty-one jars, and I heard my husband say something low about the county shop.
I gave away the last card at five minutes to noon. It was a pickled beet. It went to the honey man.
Here is how it came out, because I keep books and I can’t leave a column open.
Jean counted the cash box the next Thursday in the church basement with Dennis standing there: four hundred sixty-six dollars. Every Thursday after that my brother came down those steps with a fifty-dollar bill folded in his shirt pocket and put it in the coffee can himself. Five Thursdays. The last was the week before Halloween, two months ahead of his promise. Seven hundred sixteen dollars, to the penny.
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