Found (3)

"Are we rich now?"

Aldina asked it with her mouth full, at the table, on an ordinary Wednesday, in the same voice she used for asking what was for supper.

Laverne had the dishrag in her hand. She stood at the sink with her back to the room and wrung it out and hung it over the divider and turned the water off.

"Eat your supper."

"I'm eating it."

"Then eat it without talking."

Aldina ate it without talking. She did not ask again, then or later, which was worse than if she had.

---

The address on the checks was on Sedgefield Church Road, and Laverne drove out there on the Friday with the checkbook in the envelope on the seat beside her.

It was a brick ranch with a carport and a basketball goal on a pole and a wreath on the door. There were two cars in it. Somebody had put out those plastic candles in the front windows, the kind with the orange bulb.

A woman came to the door in a sweatshirt with a school name on it and stood behind the storm door without opening it. Behind her a television was going and a boy was talking over it.

"I'm sorry to bother you. Does Laverna Byerly live here?"

"Who?"

"Laverna. Byerly. B-y-e-r-l-y."

The woman's face did something small. "We've had mail come for her. Not lately. Back a while."

"But she doesn't live here."

"Nobody by that name's lived here. We've been here eleven years." The woman shifted the door open an inch, the way you do when you have decided the person is not selling anything. "It started up in October, I want to say. Two or three of them, bank things. I put them back in the box with no such person on it and then they quit."

"You wrote on it."

"You're supposed to. Or you throw it out. I threw the last ones out."

Laverne stood on the step with her hands at her sides.

"Is she somebody's kin?" the woman said. "You want me to ask my husband? He grew up over here."

"No, ma'am. It's all right."

"It's no trouble."

"It's all right," Laverne said. "Thank you."

She got back in the car and sat with the envelope on her knees, and the woman watched her from behind the storm door until she pulled off, because that is what you do when a stranger comes to your house asking after a name.

The mail had come in October. That was the thing that stayed with her all the way back down Sedgefield Church Road. Somebody had been sending bank things to that name at that house six weeks before she picked an envelope up off the shoulder of her own road, and a woman in a sweatshirt had written no such person on them and put them back in the box, and that had been the end of it.

---

The bank was in a strip on the north end with a dry cleaner and a hair place, and it had a live tree in the lobby with paper ornaments made by somebody's Sunday school.

She waited behind a man depositing a stack of checks in a rubber band. When he was done she put the checkbook on the counter and slid it across.

"I need to give this back."

The teller was maybe forty, with reading glasses on a chain. She turned the cover with one finger.

"Is this your account, ma'am?"

"No."

"Whose is it?"

"It's got a name on it. Laverna Byerly. It's not mine. Mine's Laverne."

The teller looked at the corner of the top check for a moment and then went to the terminal and typed, and read the screen, and typed again.

"I'm not able to discuss an account with anyone who isn't on it."

"I'm not asking you to discuss it. I'm asking you to take it."

"I can't accept property that isn't yours to give me."

"It isn't mine. That's what I'm telling you."

"Then I'd say the best thing is to put it back where you found it, or take it to the sheriff's office." The teller said it kindly enough. She took her glasses off and let them hang. "How did you come by it?"

Laverne heard the woman at the next window stop counting.

"It was in the road."

"In the road."

"By my mailbox. In an envelope."

"And that was when?"

The tree had a paper ornament on it shaped like a lamb, with a child's name in glitter, and Laverne looked at it while she worked out how many weeks it had been and what number she was willing to say out loud.

"A while back."

The teller put her glasses on again. "Ma'am, has anything been written on that account?"

There was nothing to say to it. Laverne stood at the counter with her hand flat on the checkbook.

A man came over from a desk on the far side, a young man in a good sweater, and asked whether everything was all right here, and the teller said the lady was trying to turn in a checkbook that wasn't hers, and the young man looked at Laverne's scrubs and then at her face.

"If there's a problem with the account," he said, "the owner will address it with us. What I'd ask you to do is take your property and let us handle our customers."

"It isn't my property."

"Then I'd take it to the sheriff, ma'am." He put his hand out toward the door, not touching her, only indicating it. "Before there's any further issue."

She walked out through the lobby with the checkbook and the register up against her chest, past the tree and the paper lamb and the woman at the next window who had stopped counting, and she was at the car before she understood that she had been carrying them where every person in there could see them, in her scrubs, with another woman's name on the top check.

---

She came back the long way and did not mean to, and the road took her past the turn for Mrs Tilley's, which was a dirt cut between two fields with a mailbox on a chain post.

Laverne slowed for it.

A bar for the tub was forty dollars at Lowe's, and a stud finder she could borrow, and an hour with a drill.

She put her foot down and went on past and did not look in the mirror.

---

She called the clinic on the Monday, from the kitchen, with the phone book open on the counter.

The woman on the other end was patient with her. She took Aldina's information and her Health Choice number and read it back and said yes, they took that, they were one of the only ones in the county that did, and then she went to look at the book.

Laverne could hear pages.

"Sweetheart, I can put her down for the fourth of March."

"March."

"I know it."

"She's got a tooth that's bad in the back. She's chewing on one side."

"I hear you. I've got a wait list and I put everybody on it, and if I get a cancellation with a child on it I call the children first, I promise you I do." Something happened in the woman's voice. "It's not right. I've been here nine years and it's not right and I can't do one thing about it but tell you the truth about it."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You want the fourth of March?"

"Put her down for it," Laverne said.

Then she stood there with her hand on the hook for a minute, and then she called the office on Fayetteville Street, the one with the ad in the phone book that had a cartoon tooth on it.

They could see her Thursday morning.

"We do ask for payment at time of service," the girl said. "We don't file insurance for new patients until after the first visit."

"That's fine."

"Do you know what you'll be doing? Because if it's an extraction—"

"Whatever she needs."

"All right, then. Thursday at nine forty. Have her here at nine thirty."

Laverne hung up the phone and wrote Thurs 9:40 on the back of an envelope and put it under the salt shaker, and stood in the kitchen a while longer.

---

She cut Aldina's hair at the sink on the Tuesday night because it had gotten in her eyes and the school picture retakes were coming.

It went wrong immediately.

"It's crooked."

"Hold still and it won't be."

"It's crooked because you're cutting it crooked. Holding still don't fix crooked."

Laverne squared it up on the left, and then it was short on the left, so she squared up the right, and then the right was shorter, and Aldina had her head tipped back over the basin watching all of this happen upside down in the window glass.

"Mama."

"Hush."

"Mama, it's up to here now."

"It's fashionable."

"On who?"

"On a woman I saw at the Winn-Dixie."

"Was it on purpose?"

Laverne laughed so hard she had to put the scissors down on the drainer, and Aldina started laughing because she was, and got soap in her eye, and that made it worse. When they got it dried and looked at it under the kitchen light it was not as bad as it had been in the window, and it was not good either.

"It's fine," Aldina said, in the voice she used for that.

"It'll grow."

"It's fine."

Laverne sat down on the kitchen chair and pulled her in against her knees and worked her fingers through the ends of it, evening nothing.

"When we get in town," she said, "you'll go to a real one. There's one by the mall does children."

"In town."

"On a street. With other houses on it. You could walk to Amber's." Laverne turned her by the shoulder and looked at the back of her head. "There's one on Sunset with a carport. Three bedrooms. You'd get the front one, with the window on the road, and you could see everybody coming."

Aldina did not say anything for a second.

"Which one would be yours?"

"The little one at the back. I don't need but a bed."

"You'd give me the big one?"

"You'd have to keep it clean."

"I'd keep it clean," Aldina said.

---

Two nights later Laverne was awake when the tape came off a roll on the front porch. Three or four inches of it, slow, the way you pull it when you are trying not to make a sound.

Then something gave three short beeps, close together, and stopped.

She lay there and listened for the hall.

Aldina's door had been open a hand's width for two weeks now, and there was a board outside it that had always given, and Laverne knew the sound of it the way you know the sound of your own child crossing a floor at night.

It did not come.

Nothing came. The house sat there.

In the morning Aldina got her bowl down and ate her cereal, and Laverne watched her over the top of the cabinet door. She was carrying something. It was in the way she was sitting.

"You sleep all right?"

"Yes, ma'am," Aldina said.

Laverne let it go.

---

She got up for water the night before Thursday and did not turn on the hall light because she never did.

The coats were on the pegs by the door where they always were, her work coat and Aldina's and the old green one nobody wore. She went past them and ran the tap and drank a glass standing at the sink in the dark, and rinsed it, and set it upside down on the drainer.

On the way back she stopped in the hall.

Cigarettes.

She stood there with her hand on the wall. She had been at Hollis's that morning and Hollis smoked in the house with the windows shut, and it got in everything, it got in her hair, it got in the coat and stayed in it for days, and she had hung that coat on that peg not eight hours ago.

She went to bed.

Aldina's door was open a hand's width the way she kept it now, and there was nothing to see in it but the dark.

---

The appointment was at nine forty on Thursday and Laverne had the envelope with Thurs 9:40 on it under the salt shaker where she could see it from the table.

That night something came in under the kitchen and settled its weight, and stayed, and did not sound like the coons that worked the cans, or like anything that went on four feet at all.

Laverne lay on her back with her eyes open and waited for the board outside her daughter's door.

She waited a long time for it.

 

To Be Continued...