He’d been stacking the cash in an envelope. Every cold, wet, exhausting dollar of it.
For the mortgage.
Tonight, near the end of the shift, a crate had come off a stacker wrong and caught his hand — nothing broken, the plant’s first-aid man had wrapped it, but it had frightened him, and it had been the end of his ability to keep the secret standing up.
He reached into his soaked jacket and put the envelope on the kitchen table, between my coffee cup and Denise’s phone.
“It’s four thousand two hundred dollars, Mom,” he said, and his voice cracked the way Dan’s used to. “I know it’s not everything. But I heard you in the car. I heard you crying about the house. And I couldn’t — Dad built the porch. I wasn’t going to let us lose Dad’s porch without trying.”
I looked at the envelope.
I looked at my son’s ruined hands.
