Sunday night, I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a pile of receipts.
Concrete: $340. Carriage bolts, lock washers, and steel straps: $218. Welding rod and grinding discs: $96. A new chainsaw chain for Royce, because we ruined his on a hidden nail in one of the rig mats: $32.
Total: $686.
I did the math on a napkin. Six months of Vance’s toll for one family would have been about $2,400. For fourteen families on our road, it would have been almost $34,000.
I wasn’t going to ask anybody to pay me back. But the next morning, when I opened my mailbox, there was an envelope inside with no stamp on it. No name. Just “For the bridge” written on the front in pencil. Inside were four twenty-dollar bills.
By Wednesday, there’d been eleven envelopes. One had a hundred-dollar bill in it and a note from Darnell’s wife. One had three crumpled ones and a quarter and a drawing of a bridge in purple crayon.
That one was from Tilly.
I paid off the concrete and the bolts and put the rest in a coffee can on my kitchen counter. A different coffee can. Maxwell House. I thought that was funny.
Easton was sitting at the table doing his spelling homework while I counted it.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Is Mr. Tolliver a bad guy?”
I put down the money.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he is.”
“Then why’d he make Tilly’s mom pay?”
I thought about it for a long time. I thought about Vance standing at my fence five years ago with his hat in his hand.
“Because once, a long time ago, a lot of people hurt him, and nobody said sorry,” I said. “And he decided the only way to make it fair was to make everybody else hurt a little too. But that doesn’t make it fair. It just makes more people hurt.”
Easton chewed on his pencil. “That’s dumb.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Grown-ups are dumb sometimes.”
He nodded like that was something he’d suspected for a while.
Then he went back to spelling “important.”
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