Chapter 5: Thirty-One Thousand

The page had my face on it.

It was my junior prom photo, cropped so you couldn't see the boy next to me, with a pink filter laid over it.

VEDA'S LAST WISH, the header said. Help our girl see her sister married.

Below that was a paragraph, written in my mother's voice, which I knew.

"Veda has always put her family first. Now the doctors give her six months, and her only wish is to see her little sister walk down the aisle."

I read the next line standing in the church parking lot with the sun in my eyes.

"Every dollar will go toward making that day perfect for Veda."

The counter at the top said $31,420.

Two hundred and twelve donors.

It had been live since eight o'clock that morning, when the priest read it out after the homily.

Below it, my mother had left a comment from this afternoon.

"Florist paid in full, thanks to you all! Veda is so grateful."

I turned the phone so Glenn could read it.

He read it twice.

His face did not change, but the knuckles of the hand on his truck door went pale.

"Get in," he said.

"Where are we going?"

"To get your money."

"It isn't my money. It's thirty-one thousand dollars from people who put it in a basket because they thought I was dying."

"You are the one they thought they were helping."

"I know." My throat closed. "That's why it makes me so angry."

He drove.

I watched the brick bungalows go by, every one of them kinder than the house I grew up in.

At a red light I said, "Mom told me you pay her. Every month."

His hands tightened on the wheel.

"I know what that is, Glenn. I'm not stupid. I just can't have that conversation today."

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