“Manage what, Brenda?” Mark didn’t look at his wife when he said it. He kept his eyes locked on me through the screen wire. “The paper says four thousand two hundred dollars. It says you signed for every single one of those letters at the roadside box. And it says none of it went to Leo.”
Brenda let out a short, ugly sound, half laugh, half spit. “We needed the tires on the sedan, Mark! You know we did! She’s sitting out here with her pension and her little garden while we’re drowning in bills!”
“You didn’t ask,” Mark said. He didn’t yell. That was the thing about Mark; when he got truly mad, he just stopped moving entirely. “You didn’t ask me, and you sure as hell didn’t ask her. You just took it out of a kid’s mail.”
“She’s my mother-in-law!” Brenda cried out, and a couple of blue jays up in the mesquite tree scattered off into the brush. “She has more than she needs!”
“Not anymore she doesn’t,” I said.
I pushed the screen door open just enough to let the latch click. I didn’t step outside. I stayed right there in the cool dark of the kitchen, looking out at the two of them standing on the scarred wood of the porch where my husband had sat every evening until his lungs gave out.
“The money is in a trust now, Brenda,” I told her, and I made sure every word came out slow and plain, the way my daddy taught me when we were counting fence posts. “Leo’s trust. It’s locked up tight until he’s eighteen, and Arthur Henderson holds the key with me. You won’t ever touch another envelope that comes into this yard.”
Brenda looked like she wanted to spit, but she didn’t have the stomach for it with Mark standing beside her like an oak tree that had finally rotted through at the roots. She turned around on the heel of her sandal, walked straight down the steps, and got back into the passenger side of the truck without another word. She pulled the door shut hard enough to rattle the fender.
Mark didn’t follow her right away. He stood there on the top step for a long minute, looking down at his boots, then up at the sky where the heat haze was starting to blur the ridge of the mountains.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered. It was the same tone he used when he was eight years old and had broken the glass in the back door with a stray baseball.
“Don’t tell me, Mark,” I said, and my hand went down to rest on the wooden doorframe. “Tell your boy. He’s the one who wanted a twelve-dollar water gun.”
Mark didn’t say anything else. He turned around, walked back to the truck, and climbed behind the wheel. The gravel crunched under his tires as he backed out of the drive, throwing up a little cloud of white dust that settled slow on the creosote bushes by the mail box.
An hour later, Leo came walking up the path from the irrigation ditch with his bicycle chain still black on his fingers and the new plastic water pistol tucked proudly under his arm like a rifle.
I was sitting back down at the enamel table with my glass of water, watching the electric fan go left, and right, and left again. Tick, tick, tick.
“Grandma,” Leo said, dropping his boots by the door with a loud clatter. “Can we fill it up?”
“Come here first, honey,” I told him.
I opened the blue passbook Arthur had given me and laid it flat on the oilcloth between the salt shaker and the water glass. I slid it across the surface until it stopped right against his little brown wrist.
“What’s this?” he asked, his eyes going wide as he traced the black letters of his own name typed out on the paper.
“That’s yours,” I said, and for the first time all week, my shoulders felt like they could finally drop an inch or two. “Every last cent of it. And nobody’s ever going to take it out of the box again.”
