Found (1)

The water had gone cool while Hollis argued about getting into it, so Laverne ran more hot and tested it against her wrist and told him it was fine now, which it was.

"You'll scald me."

"I won't scald you."

"You'll scald me and then you'll write it down that I fell."

"I'll write down that you talked for eleven minutes with your shirt off in December."

He got in. He always got in. The trick was to keep talking while she moved him, so that his hands had something to do besides grip, and she had learned in seven years that the subject did not matter. She talked about the dog two houses down that had taken to sitting in the road. She got his shoulders wet, then his back, and she kept one hand flat between his shoulder blades the whole time so he knew where she was.

"That dog will get killed," Hollis said.

"That dog will get somebody killed."

Afterward she put him in the chair by the window with the towel around him and went out to the car for the bag from the Fast Fare. A sausage biscuit and a bottled Coke, three dollars and change out of her own pocket, which she was not permitted to do. It had been in the handbook and it had been in the training and it had been said out loud by a woman with a clipboard who had never bathed anybody. Laverne had heard it and gone on doing it since 1993.

Hollis ate the biscuit in six bites and drank half the Coke and set the rest on the sill where it would be warm and undrinkable by tomorrow.

"You don't have to keep doing that," he said.

"I know it."

She wrote her time on the sheet, and her mileage, because the mileage was the one number the agency wanted from her and the one number she never got wrong. Nineteen miles to Hollis and back. She wrote it in the box.

Hollis kept the house at eighty and smoked in it with the windows shut, and when she came out onto the steps the cold took the wet off her arms in about four seconds. She stood there a minute with the storm door against her back. Then she went to the car.

---

The Buick made the noise again on 62, the one that came from the left front and only above forty. She held it at thirty-eight all the way past the quarry and the Baptist church with the sign that had said the same thing since October, and turned off onto Snow Camp Road, and then onto the gravel.

The house sat back off the road with nothing near it. That was why she had it. Two bedrooms and a crawlspace and a heat pump that had never worked right, and it was forty a month under anything in town because nobody wanted to be four miles out with no sidewalk and no streetlight, and Laverne had wanted exactly that, or had told herself she had.

The mail was three pieces. She carried it in and put it on the counter with the rest.

The counter had a system. It was not by amount. On the left were the ones where a person would call, and on the right were the ones where a machine would. The power bill was on the left because a woman named Dessa at the office in Asheboro had called twice now and had been decent about it both times, and being called by Dessa was worse than a notice. The hospital bill from Aldina's arm in the summer was on the right and had been on the right since August.

Laverne moved the power bill an inch toward her and left it there.

---

Aldina was at the table with a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper folded into quarters.

"What's this."

"It's about jobs."

"What about them."

"You have to write what your parent does and then draw it." Aldina turned the paper around. She had written, in her careful slanting hand, My mother washes old people.

Laverne read it twice.

"That is not what I do."

"You wash them."

"I assist with bathing."

"That's washing."

"It is assisting." She sat down across from her daughter and pulled the paper over. "Put that I help people stay in their own houses."

"That's too long."

"It's four more words."

"It's boring," Aldina said. "Miss Pugh said make it interesting."

"Then put that I drive nineteen miles each way to assist with bathing."

Aldina looked at her with the specific flatness she had inherited from somewhere. "That's worse."

They settled on My mother takes care of people in their homes, which Aldina wrote out and then studied and then said was still boring, and Laverne said that was the job, and Aldina drew a bathtub anyway.

---

The envelope was on the shoulder of the gravel about thirty feet short of the mailbox, and Laverne saw it in the headlights on the Thursday and thought it was trash until she was almost past it.

She backed up. She got out with the engine running and the door open and the dome light on.

It was a bank envelope, the long kind with the cellophane window, and it had been out overnight at least. The bottom corner was torn and gone soft. There was no address showing through the window because the thing inside had shifted, and when she squeezed the envelope she felt the flat square weight of it and knew what it was before she opened it.

A checkbook. Vinyl cover, the burgundy kind. Two hundred and fifty checks and a register in the flap and the whole thing still stiff from the box. The top check was numbered 101 and not one of them had been torn out.

She held it in the doorway light and read the corner of it.

LAVERNA BYERLY

And an address on Sedgefield Church Road, which was maybe nine miles off, and a bank she had heard of but never been inside.

Laverne stood there long enough that the engine note changed. She put the checkbook back in the envelope and put the envelope on the seat and drove the last thirty feet to the house.

---

The first night she left it on top of the refrigerator.

The second day she moved it to the drawer under the phone, which had the tape and the church directory and the flashlight in it, and that was where it lived for a while.

Nineteen days.

She looked at it more than she thought about it. What she looked at was not the checks. It was the name. Byerly was thick on the ground in this county and had been for two hundred years; there were four in the phone book on this side of the river alone and Laverne was not related to any of them that anybody could prove. But Laverna. She had never met one. She had never heard it said out loud. She had gone twenty-nine years being asked whether she was named for the one on the television, and here was a woman nine miles away with the same seven letters and one of them turned.

Twice she got as far as the phone book. There was no Laverna Byerly listed on Sedgefield Church Road or anywhere else, and there was no listing for the address either, which meant nothing, because half the people she worked for had the phone in a dead husband's name.

Once she took it out to the car with the idea of driving to the address, and sat in the driveway, and did not.

She could have carried it into a police station in eleven minutes. She knew that the whole time. She thought about it as a thing she was going to do soon, the way she thought about the hospital bill on the right side of the counter, and the days went by and it stayed in the drawer under the phone with the tape and the flashlight.

What she noticed about it, when she noticed anything, was that it did not behave. The pages clung when she thumbed them, the way a new deck of cards will. And when she tore the first check out to look at the back of it, it came away with a soft sound instead of the clean snap she expected, and left a furred edge along the stub. She put the loose check back in the flap. Her fingers had a slickness on them afterward, faint, like the counter at the Fast Fare, and she wiped them on her scrubs and got the flashlight out and went to look at the breaker box because that was what she had opened the drawer for.

---

On the nineteenth day Dessa called from the power company at ten in the morning and was decent about it again, and Laverne stood in the kitchen with the phone cord wrapped once around her hand and said the eighteenth would work, and after she hung up she stood there some more.

Then she opened the drawer.

She drove past the Food Lion in town, where the girl on register four had been in her class at Southeast, and kept going, out the other side, out to the Winn-Dixie by the bypass where the lot was mostly empty at two in the afternoon and where she had been maybe twice in her life.

She was still in her scrubs. She had not thought about that until she was inside, and then she thought about it, and then she saw a woman in the same blue coming out of the pharmacy aisle with a cart, and she stopped thinking about it.

Milk. Bread. Eggs. A five-pound bag of leg quarters and a bag of rice and a jar of peanut butter and the grape jelly Aldina liked and a box of the cereal with the toucan. Two cans of green beans. A pack of the school-size juice boxes, because Aldina had been taking water in a thermos and had stopped saying anything about it, which was how Laverne knew.

Thirty-one dollars and eighty-four cents.

She put the checkbook on the little shelf and wrote the date and the store and the amount, and her hand did the rest of it before any part of her had agreed to it, and what her hand wrote at the bottom was Laverne Byerly.

She looked at it.

The girl at the register was seventeen at the outside and had a rubber band on her wrist and was looking at the belt.

Laverne tore the check out. It made the soft sound. She turned it around and slid it across and the girl took it and looked at it for about as long as it takes to look at a check, and pulled it through the machine, and the machine stamped it, and she put it in the drawer under the tray and tore off the receipt.

"You want your milk in a separate bag?"

"No, ma'am."

"It's no trouble."

"It's fine."

The girl put the milk in with the eggs anyway and handed the bags across and said to have a good one.

---

Laverne put the groceries in the trunk and got in the car and did not start it.

A woman two spaces down was trying to fold a stroller one-handed. There was a man in a truck eating something out of a foil wrapper, and a kid pushing four carts in a line with his hip against the last one. Through the windshield and then through the store glass she could see the girl on the register, who was talking to the bag boy about something and laughing.

She waited for it to come.

It did not come. The stroller went in and the woman drove off. Somebody's alarm went off two rows over and shut itself up again. The man in the truck balled up the foil and sat there.

After a while Laverne started the car, and the noise came from the left front when she got up onto the bypass, and she took her foot off and let it settle down to thirty-eight and stayed there.

---

She had the chicken in the oven by five. Aldina came in and put her book bag on the chair and opened the refrigerator and stood in it.

"There's juice."

"The little ones?"

"The little ones."

Aldina took one and did not say anything about it, which was correct, and got up on the counter to reach the cups even though there were cups on the drainer, and Laverne told her to get down, and she got down.

The house was cold at the back where it always was. Laverne put a towel along the bottom of the bathroom door and turned the oven off at six and left the door open the way you were not supposed to.

She kept expecting the phone.

It did not ring that night, and it did not ring the next day, and by the end of the week the check had gone wherever checks went, and no one had come up the gravel, and the power bill had moved from the left side of the counter into the trash.

 

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/found-2