I looked at that figure for a long time, there in the back of the feed store, with the smell of deer corn and molasses all around me. One hundred eighty six thousand dollars, deposited in October, three months before he asked me to breakfast. I had kept the books of Tubb Tire and Lube for forty one years, and I knew to the nickel what that shop cleared in a year. This was nearly two years of profit, lifted a little at a time and set down in a bank ninety miles away, where nobody who knew me would ever see it.
“Mama,” Crystal said, wiping her face with the heel of her hand, “I did not know. Brittany wore Granddaddy brooch to church, and it caught the light, and I asked where she got it. She said Daddy gave it to her. So I took it off her collar in front of the whole fellowship hall, and the paper fell out of her purse.” She opened her fist. The little gold locomotive lay in her palm with the socket of its headlight bare and dark. “She said the red stone came out in the wash.”
I took the brooch and held it up to the window. My father had pinned it on my wedding dress with his own big careful fingers in 1985, and told me that it was so I would remember whose girl I was first. I had wanted to cry for a month and had not allowed myself. Now I cried, quietly, in the swivel chair of a feed store office, with my daughter holding my hand and the boys out front arguing about sweet feed. When it was over, I blew my nose and picked up the telephone.
Mrs. Pettigrew, the lady lawyer in Tupelo, answered on the second ring. She listened to me read the numbers, and when I finished, she was quiet a moment. “Honey,” she said, “Curtis signed a financial affidavit in this case. Under oath. It lists his savings at four thousand dollars.” I said that I had noticed. “Then he has lied to a judge,” she said, “and a judge does not forgive that. Bring the paper, bring your daughter, and bring those ledgers. Be here at two.” We made it by quarter to.
A man who hides his money from his wife has already told her, in the only language he speaks, exactly what he thinks of her.
The deposition was set for the last Friday of February, in a long conference room with a view of the courthouse. Curtis came in a pressed shirt, with his friend from the Rotary at his elbow, and he nodded to me as if we were neighbors at a funeral. I sat across from him in my blue church dress with the green ledgers stacked at my right hand. Mrs. Pettigrew laid the Memphis statement on the table, and I watched the face of the Rotarian go the color of putty. Curtis looked at the ceiling.
Then I opened the first ledger and did something I had not planned. I turned to the pages for the last three years and read aloud, in a calm voice, a list of small figures. Tire rebates not deposited. Warranty refunds routed to a second account. Cash sales entered as zero. I had written every one of them down at the time, in pencil, without knowing why. “I write everything down,” I told the court reporter. “It is how I was raised.” The lawyer of Curtis stopped taking notes. The room was perfectly silent but for the humming of the lights.
In the hallway afterwards, I found Brittany sitting on a bench with her Zumba bag between her feet. She was crying so hard that her shoulders shook. She said that Curtis had told her the money was an inheritance, that he had said I knew all about it, that I had given my blessing. She had believed him because he was kind to her. She held out a closed hand, and in it, wrapped in a tissue, lay a small red stone. “It fell out,” she whispered. “I kept it so I could give it back. I am so sorry, Mrs. Tubb.” I closed my fingers over it. I did not say it was all right.
The judge was a stern woman named Hollis, and she gave Curtis no quarter. By the end of March I had the house on Church Street, the lot at the lake, half the value of the shop, half the Memphis account, and a penalty for the lie under oath that made the Rotarian whistle through his teeth. Curtis paid my lawyer fees. He did not argue. When the judge read the order, he sat with his hands folded on the table, an old man in a pressed shirt, and for the first time in forty years he looked small to me.
A jeweler on Main Street in Tupelo set the red stone back into the headlight of the locomotive in an afternoon, and would not take a dime. He said anyone who wore a railroad brooch for her father deserved a jeweler. I fastened it on my Sunday dress the next morning and walked into the First Baptist Church at Booneville with my chin up. Nobody said a word. A good many of the ladies touched my arm as I passed. Crystal sat beside me, and for the first time since January she sang every verse out loud.
I kept the job at the feed store for Monday through Wednesday, and on Thursday and Friday I opened an office in the front room of the house on Church Street with a hand lettered sign. Jo Nell Tubb, Bookkeeping and Tax. I have eleven clients now. The first was the widow of a man who had never let her see the checkbook. She sat in my kitchen and cried over a cup of tea, and I told her that I understood, and that we would start at the beginning, and that no one had ever done the numbers wrong who wrote them down.
I saw Curtis once, at the Waffle House, in April. He was alone at a booth with a pecan waffle he had not touched. He looked up and said, “I am sorry, Jo Nell. I should have said you earned your share.” I stood there a moment with my coffee. Then I said, as pleasantly as I could manage, “Be fair, Curtis. I earned every dime.” I patted his shoulder and went to the counter. Behind me I heard him laugh, a short, cracked sound, and I did not look back, and the little gold train rode steady on my collar all the way home.
