The next part I found out from Mrs. Pruitt.
She’s worked in the middle school office for twenty-two years. She couldn’t keep it to herself after the supper. Nobody who was part of this story particularly wanted to keep it to themselves, once it was finally safe to tell.
On a Friday during his lunch period, Wyatt walked into her office.
He put a hundred and ten dollars on her desk. Counted twice.
He asked her to put it toward Micah Dermot’s lunch account. And to never, under any circumstances, tell anybody who it came from.
“I asked him if he was sure,” Mrs. Pruitt told me. “Because that is a great deal of money for a boy his age to hand over without blinking. I wanted him to understand there was no taking it back once it posted.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I’m sure. I earned it mowing. It’s mine to give.'”
She took off her glasses and wiped them on her sweater.
“Mrs. Teague, I’ve had grown men come into my office red-faced, arguing over a two-dollar late fee on a field trip form. I have never once had anybody, child or grown-up, be so certain about giving away that much money all at once.”
She told me she cried a little after he left. She’d told him that sometimes people did pay off accounts anonymously. Grown folks, mostly. Church people.
And Wyatt had said, “I know. That’s why nobody will think it’s me.”
“That might be the most practical sentence I’ve ever heard come out of a sixth grader,” Mrs. Pruitt said.
That was two hundred and forty dollars.
Every single cent he’d made all summer. Standing behind a push mower in heat that put salt rings on his shirts. Gone in eleven days.
And he never told a soul.
Not his best friend, Caleb. Not his grandfather. Not me.
Not even his own daddy.
Curtis drives a grain truck. He was two states over, hauling loads to Ohio, most of October. He didn’t hear one word about any of this until after the supper.
When I finally called him the next morning and told him, Curtis was quiet on the phone for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Curtis? Are you there?”
Then he said, “That’s my boy.”
And his voice cracked clean through. The same way Dana Dermot’s had the night before.
I want that said plainly. Because a boy ought to have his father in his story, and not just his grandmother.
Curtis was away working the job that keeps this family’s lights on. Same as his own daddy was away doing linework thirty years before him.
And the very first thing Curtis did when he got home two days later was drive straight to the Dermots’ rental. With a chainsaw and a truck bed full of split oak.
Because Roy Dermot had mentioned offhand at the supper that his brother’s basement ran cold.
Curtis Teague doesn’t know how to show up empty-handed. Not once he knows where to show up.
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