$340 was missing from the coffee can in my closet, and my husband swore his mother had taken it.
“Mama’s had sticky fingers her whole life,” Dwayne said.
I told them both I’d worked a double and would sleep until supper. Then I lay down in my work shirt, shut the blinds, pulled the quilt up, and waited.
Judy Cole is sixty-eight and five foot nothing. She has a key to our house because she comes every Thursday to do Dwayne’s work shirts. For nine years, I’d been afraid of saying the wrong thing to her. She didn’t hug me at my wedding. At the family Christmas party she called me “Dwayne’s wife,” as if I came with the truck.
I’d been putting money aside for my daughter’s braces in that can. Every payday I added a hundred dollars and wrote it on a strip of masking tape inside the lid. For eleven weeks, the amount and the tape hadn’t matched. Some Fridays the can was short. Some weeks there was more in it than I had put there.
I kept counting. At work, I’m a shift lead at the Walmart in Hazard, and my drawer balances to the penny every night. At home, I’d count the coffee-can money and then count it again.
“I think something’s wrong with the can,” I told Dwayne.
He went quiet. I wanted him to tell me I’d miscounted. Instead, he said, “Mama took from my granddaddy’s store when she was a girl. Everybody knows.”
“So you think it’s her?”
“She’s old. She’s my mama. Don’t make a fuss.”
I loved him for protecting her. That’s the part I was ashamed to admit later. I thought he was defending a woman I couldn’t bring myself to challenge, and I let his explanation settle over the matter.
But the money was for our daughter. I cried in the truck at the Marathon station because I didn’t know how to protect her teeth from his mother.
At two o’clock Wednesday morning, I finally told myself what I had been avoiding: if I was wrong, women all over Perry County would hear I’d accused Judy Cole in her own son’s house. I decided to find out anyway.
Wednesday night I called Judy.
“Don’t mind me tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be dead asleep.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“I worked a double. I’ll sleep till supper.”
“All right, honey.”
The next afternoon, I lay down and kept my breathing slow and heavy. I have had grown men scream at me over a return at the service desk. I know how to keep my face still when I need to.
At 3:20, the closet door creaked.
When I cracked one eye, Judy was standing over my bed with my coffee can. She was looking right at me.
“Danielle?” she whispered. “You awake, honey?”
I didn’t move. She waited a long time, then turned toward the closet with the can against her chest. I heard the lid come off.
“Sixty short,” she whispered. “Lord help me.”
There was a rustle of paper. Then the lid snapped back on. She set the can on the shelf slowly, so it wouldn’t clank.
On her way out, she stopped at the foot of the bed. I thought she was going to say something. Instead, she pulled the quilt over my feet, which had worked their way out, and tiptoed away.
I lay there with tears running into my ears. Nine years of being scared of that woman, and she had tucked my feet in.
Then I heard her in the kitchen on the phone, speaking too low for me to catch. At 3:45, Dwayne’s truck came into the driveway. He was never home before five.
I got up in my sock feet and went to the closet. My fingers weren’t working right, and I nearly dropped the lid. On Tuesday, the can had held $180. I counted it twice.
Now it held $240.
The new bills were folded in thirds.
Outside, on the front porch, Judy’s voice came through the screen door, low and hard in a way I had never heard from her.
“This is the last time, son.”
“Mama, keep your voice down,” Dwayne said. “She’s sleeping.”
“She works herself to the bone for that baby, and you, ”
The screen door banged, and I lost the rest.
I stood in my bedroom holding the can against my chest the same way Judy had held it. I knew Dwayne sang to our daughter in the car every morning, loud and off-key. He had driven four hours to Lexington in a snowstorm when my daddy had his heart attack. He also kept scratch-off tickets in the ashtray of his truck and told me they belonged to his buddy.
I knew Judy paid for her bingo cards at the fire hall with bills folded in thirds. I had seen her do it a hundred times and never connected it to the money in my closet. I had been watching her for the wrong reason.
My daughter was at her cousin’s house down the road, grinning with that crooked front tooth. I thought of her and then of the whole town. If I went outside, there would be no taking it back. Dwayne would know I had been awake. Judy would know I had heard. I’d be the woman who made a scene on her own front porch.
I decided I’d rather be that woman than let the money keep disappearing.
I wiped my face with my sleeve and went down the hall holding the can in both hands. Dwayne stood on the top step with his back to the door. Judy saw me through the screen first. She looked stricken and put one hand out, as if she could stop me without touching me.
Dwayne turned around.
“Babe,” he said. “You’re up.”
I wish I could tell you I said something clever. I pushed the screen door open and held the can between them.
“Judy,” I said, “I’m sorry I thought it was you.”
She lowered her hand. “You heard us?”
“I heard enough to know I was wrong.”
Dwayne looked from me to his mother. “You don’t have to do this right now.”
“I do,” Judy said. Her voice was still quiet, but it didn’t soften. “She’s got a right to know.”
He glanced at the can. “Mama, don’t.”
That was when I stopped looking at Judy.
“How much have you taken?” I asked him.
He started to answer, then stopped. “I was going to put it back.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Judy stayed on the porch. She wasn’t looking at me now. She kept her eyes on her son.
“I saw him with it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let you keep thinking it was me.”
The bills folded in thirds weren’t proof that Judy had been taking money. They were the way she handled cash. The extra bills in the can had been her attempts to put some back. She had come into the bedroom to count what was left and discovered how much was still missing.
“You let me blame her,” I said.
Dwayne rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I didn’t want you mad at me.”
“So you told me it was your mother.”
“I didn’t say I saw her take it.”
“You said everybody knew.”
He looked down at the porch steps. “I know.”
Judy gave a small, tired shake of her head. “I told him to stop. I told him this was the last time.”
Dwayne didn’t answer her. He looked at me instead, but I couldn’t help thinking about how easily he had given me a story that fit what I already feared about his mother.
“Why?” I asked.
He said he’d taken money from the can and spent some of it on scratch-off tickets. The can had been there, he said. He thought he could replace what he took before I noticed.
“You knew what that money was for.”
“I know.”
“You knew I was counting it.”
“I know.”
Judy stepped down one stair. “Don’t keep saying you know if you’re not going to do anything about it.”
Dwayne’s face tightened. For once, I didn’t rush to make his answer easier for him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I wanted to hear that and didn’t want it to be enough. “You let me be afraid of her for nine years. You let me think she was taking from our girl.”
“I didn’t mean for it to get like this.”
“It already was like this.”
Judy looked at me then. “I should’ve told you sooner.”
I didn’t have a clean answer for her. She had tried to put money back without telling me why, and she had let me keep blaming her. I could understand why she might have wanted to spare her son. I could also see that sparing him had left me in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. This time I meant that I had believed Dwayne’s story over what I’d seen in the can, though I still didn’t know how to say all of that without making it sound like an excuse.
Judy nodded once. “I know.”
I asked Dwayne to put back what he had taken. He said he would. I told him that wasn’t enough by itself, and that I wasn’t going to keep the braces money where either of us could treat it like spare cash. He didn’t argue. We would have to work out how to replace it, and how to handle money between us, without pretending the problem had been a misunderstanding.
Judy stayed on the porch while Dwayne and I went inside. She didn’t come in to finish the shirts. I didn’t ask her to.
The can held $240 when I counted it that Thursday. I had started the day believing Judy was the one taking from it. By the time I came back into the house, I knew my husband had let me blame his mother for what he had done.
Judy hadn’t taken the money. Dwayne had.
