“Is that cash?” Russell asked, stepping closer to the counter.
He reached out, his hand hovering over the rim, but I pulled the tin slightly toward my side of the sink.
“It looks like twenties,” I said.
I lifted the first bundle. The rubber band was dry and snapped, sending a small piece of red rubber into the empty sink.
“There’s more under here,” I whispered.
By midday, the kitchen table was cleared of everything except the blue-rimmed tin and the green stacks. I sat on the vinyl chair, counting each pile while Russell watched from the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the doorframe.
“Five thousand, four hundred,” I said, laying down a stack of fifties.
The bills were old, the faces of Jackson and Grant small and centered in their frames, the paper soft as flannel. They smelled of cedar and the small cellar under the pantry.
“Mama worked thirty-two years at the dry cleaners,” Russell said. “She made ninety-five dollars a week when she started. She didn’t have five thousand dollars to her name.”
“She had more than that,” I said.
I laid out another stack, the rubber bands snapping against my thumb. The sound was loud in the small house, like the small firecrackers the boys used to throw on the Fourth of July.
“Ten thousand,” I murmured.
Russell walked to the window, his eyes scanning the gravel driveway. “Wayne must have left it. It’s his money.”
“Wayne didn’t leave five dollars in a drawer when he died,” I said. “You know that as well as I do. He spent every cent he ever touched.”
My stepfather had spent twenty years jingling loose change in his trouser pockets, never holding a job for more than three months at the lumber yard. He was always about to buy a tractor or a new piece of land, but nothing ever came of it.
