Found (4)

The office on Fayetteville Street had a saltwater tank in the waiting room and a rack of magazines with the address labels torn off.

They took Aldina back at nine fifty. Laverne sat under the tank with her coat in her lap and watched a yellow fish go around a piece of coral eleven times. At ten twenty the door opened and a woman in a smock brought Aldina out with a folded gauze pad in her hand and a sticker on her shirt, and behind her the dentist came as far as the doorway and said it had been abscessed a good while and had come out clean, and that the space would want watching but not today.

"Y'all did the right thing bringing her."

"Yes, sir."

At the front desk the girl turned the monitor and said the number out loud. There were two people in the chairs behind Laverne, an older man with his hat on his knee and a woman with a baby carrier, and the girl said the number at the volume you say a number when there are people in the chairs behind somebody.

Laverne put the checkbook on the counter and wrote it and tore it out. It made the soft sound.

The girl took it and stapled the receipt to the appointment card and told Aldina she had been real brave.

---

In the parking lot Aldina got in the front seat because the back door was frozen shut and sat with the gauze in her fist.

"Can I have the drink now?"

"When we get to the house."

"I can't feel my mouf."

"That's the medicine."

Aldina put two fingers on her own bottom lip and pressed it, and let go, and pressed it again. She turned her whole head to look at her mother.

"Mama."

"What."

"I have a whole nother face."

"You do not."

"I have a face on the inside," Aldina said, "and it's not doing anything," and she pushed her lip out with her tongue to demonstrate and it hung there, and Laverne laughed at her, and Aldina made a noise like a duck and did it again all the way out to Old 421.

---

At eleven forty that night the first blow landed on the front door hard enough to move the pictures on the wall.

Laverne came off the bed and into the hall with her hand on the wall. It came again, four times, five, and a man's voice went up over it.

"LAVERNE."

The porch light was not on. Something crossed the front window from left to right and put a shadow through the curtain across the ceiling.

"LAVERNE BYERLY."

She went down the hall.

"LA-VER-NA," somebody else shouted, and drew it out, and laughed at the end of it. Two of them were laughing. The rest of whatever was out there did not make any sound at all.

The kitchen was past the front door. The phone was in the kitchen.

Aldina's room was the other way.

Laverne went the other way.

Aldina was already sitting up. Laverne got her off the mattress and put her against the far wall between the bed and the closet and pushed the door shut and turned the button in the knob, and got her hands under the corner of the dresser and walked it around and put it against the door with her hip and her shoulder, and the drawer came out and went over on the floor and she left it.

"Mama—"

"Don't talk."

Out at the front the door was being hit with something that was not a hand. It went through on the fourth one.

Boots came in across the front room.

"WHERE'S THE CHECKBOOK."

"Laverne. Laverne. Where's our money at."

They were in the hall. There were more of them than she had thought. Somebody knocked the pictures down going past, and a giggle came out of one of them, high and quick, the way it comes out of a boy who has been holding it in, and the boy next to him caught it and they were both gone for a second, hissing at each other, shh, shh.

A third voice, further back, said, "Hey."

That was all it said. They stopped.

"Miss By-er-ly," one of the boys said, into the wood.

The knob turned and stopped against the lock.

"Give us our money back," somebody said, right up against the wood, conversational, and then hit the door with the flat of his hand eleven times fast.

The dresser walked out from the door an inch on the first shoulder.

Aldina had a fistful of the back of her mother's nightshirt.

The second one moved the dresser four inches and the door came off the top hinge, and the third one put the whole of it down flat across the dresser into the room.

Then nothing.

The doorway was full of men and none of them came through it. Somebody's flashlight was down at the floor and throwing everything upward, and there was breathing, and a strap creaking, and one of them shifting his feet on the door panel where it lay. Aldina had a fistful of the back of Laverne's nightshirt and was pulling on it.

It went on long enough to be a decision.

"Whoa," a man said. "Whoa. We're good. We're good."

And the lights came on. Not the room light. Two of them, up on the shoulders of men in the doorway, white and shaking, and the room went the color of a photograph.

---

"Lights up, Ronnie. Get the wall."

Somebody's hand came in and turned on the switch.

There were six of them in the door and the hall behind it. Two were boys, nineteen or twenty, one still holding the thing they had used on the door, both of them looking at her the way you look at something you have done. One was on his knees taking the door panel off the dresser. One was standing at the back by the coat pegs with a work light in his hand. One had a long pole with a gray sausage of foam on the end of it, held out over the doorway and kept there.

And one had the camera up on his shoulder with the light bolted to it, and he was not looking at her at all. He was looking through the eyepiece, and he moved twice without anybody telling him to, and he said one word the whole time she knew him.

The young man in the fleece jacket with the clipboard came in about a foot and stopped and put both his palms up.

"Miss Byerly. Laverne. You are all right. Nobody here is going to touch you." He was maybe twenty-six. He had good teeth. "This is a program. It's a show. You're on Found Money."

Nobody said anything.

"Okay. Okay. Let me do this right." He looked at the camera, and then back at her, and started over in a different voice, a pleasant one. "The account is ours. Laverna Byerly is ours. Every check you wrote cleared because we put the money in there for it to clear. Nobody's out a dime. Not the bank, not the grocery store, not the tire man." He was ticking them off on the clipboard. "There's no victim, Laverne. There's no complaint. Nobody's charging you with a thing."

The man on the boom shifted his grip.

"So you can breathe," the young man said.

He waited.

He turned the clipboard around.

It was the register. It was her handwriting, and the wrong column, and the dates, and the total she had stopped carrying at the fourth line.

"This is ours too," he said. "Off your table, Tuesday."

The one on the floor got the door panel free and stood it against the wall and went out with it.

"And the funny thing is, you never once signed it Laverna." He put his finger on the bottom of a photocopied check clipped behind the register. "Nine times. Every one of them says Laverne Byerly. You wouldn't fake it. I had a bet going about you and I lost forty dollars."

He turned a page.

"The book's ours as well. We had it made. Two hundred and fifty checks and it starts at 101 and there's not one torn out of it before yours, and you never once looked, because who looks." He said it without any particular unkindness. "Nobody had that book but you."

"Ronnie."

The man at the coat pegs lifted his work light about an inch.

"Ronnie did your heat pump. Since the twenty-first of November. Under the floor, mostly, and the living room and the hall." The young man looked at her over the clipboard. "You made him coffee."

"You did," Ronnie said.

"Then there's the bank, which is a great piece." He turned another page and stopped on it. "And there's the old lady's bathroom, Laverne. You standing in it with the book in your bag."

The camera came forward half a step.

The man behind it said, "Light."

One of the boys reached over and moved the work light six inches and the room changed, and nobody said anything about it.

Aldina was standing on the mattress with her back flat against the wall and her mouth open a little on the side where the tooth had been, and she had not made a sound since the hallway, and she was not looking at any of the men.

She was looking at her mother.

---

Nobody moved for a moment.

The heat pump came on under the house and ran.

"So what we do now," the young man said, and produced a pen from inside the clipboard and clicked it, "is the fun part."

 

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