The Eight Dollars and Forty-Two Cents
The card declined the first time, and the woman tried to smile like it was nothing.
The second time, the little screen flashed red again, and the smile fell off her face.
Behind her, a man in a camouflage cap let out a long, loud sigh. Somebody further back muttered, “Unbelievable.” One of the babies strapped to her chest was screaming so hard his tiny face had turned the color of a strawberry.
The woman looked at me. Her lips were trembling.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Can you take the diapers off?”
I looked down at the screen. She was short $8.42.
And I didn’t know it yet, but that number was about to change my whole life.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning of that day, because the beginning matters. It always does.
That Friday started like every other Friday.
My alarm went off at six. I hit snooze once, then lay there staring at the water stain on my ceiling that looked a little bit like a rabbit. I’d been meaning to get someone to look at the roof for two years. I never had the money.
I could hear my mom in the kitchen. The kettle. The radio playing old country songs low, the way she liked it. The scrape of a chair.
I’m thirty-four years old and I still live with my mother. I used to be embarrassed about that. I’m not anymore. After my dad died, it was just the two of us, and somewhere along the way we stopped being a mother and a daughter who lived together and became two people holding each other up.
I pulled on my work polo, the green one with HOLLIS MARKET stitched over the pocket, and went downstairs.
“Morning, Rae,” Mom said. She was sitting at the table with her coffee and the electric bill. She had a pencil behind her ear. That’s never a good sign.
“How bad?” I asked.
She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It’s not bad. It’s just… it’s a lot for October.”
I sat down across from her and looked at the number. She was right. It was a lot.
“I’ll pick up an extra shift,” I said.
“You already work six days a week.”
“Then I’ll work seven.”
“Rachel.” She said my full name, which meant she was serious. “You can’t keep doing that. You’re going to run yourself into the ground.”
“Dad worked seven days a week sometimes.”
She went quiet. She always does when I bring him up. Not sad quiet, exactly. More like she’s listening to something far away.
“Your father,” she finally said, “was a stubborn fool who never knew when to stop.”
“I know.”
“You are just like him.”
“I know that too.”
She smiled then, a little. She reached over and squeezed my hand. Her fingers were cold. They’re always cold in the mornings.
“Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late. And take a banana. You never eat breakfast.”
I took the banana. I didn’t eat it. It sat on the passenger seat of my car all day, getting browner, like it does every day.
My car is a 2009 Honda with a cracked windshield and a check engine light that has been on so long I think of it as decoration. That morning it made a new noise when I turned the key. A kind of grinding cough.
“Not today,” I told it. “Please. Not today.”
It started on the third try. I patted the dashboard like it was a horse.
On the drive to work I did math in my head. That’s what I do. I do math everywhere. In the shower, in line at the bank, lying in bed at night. Rent we split. The electric bill. Mom’s prescriptions. Insurance on the car. Whatever that new noise was going to cost. My paycheck didn’t come until next Thursday, and I had exactly sixty-one dollars in my checking account.
Sixty-one dollars. I remember the number because I’d checked it twice that morning.