Chapter 9: Coffee Can

Gen's POV

I found the receipt on Thursday, in the mailbox at the end of the Point road.

It was a plain white envelope from the town office, addressed to Ouellette Point, Map 14, Lot 6.

I opened it standing in the road in my father's boots.

PAID IN FULL. $11,206.00. REMITTED BY: A. PETTENGILL.

I read it through.

Then I walked back up the path and went into the cottage and shut the door.

I paced the narrow room.

He had done it without asking.

He had let me stand there on Tuesday, in front of Constance, believing I had sixty days and a wall at my back.

He had known, and he had kept quiet at the pier, watching with his hat in his hand.

I took the receipt and I walked out to the truck.

No.

I didn't have a truck.

I had a bicycle that Fern had left leaning on the shed.

I took the bicycle.

It was four miles along the shore road to his cottage, and I rode them fast with the envelope in my teeth.

He wasn't there.

His truck sat in the yard, so he was somewhere close, and I stood on his porch with my chest heaving.

Then I remembered the coffee can.

It was a red Folgers tin with a plastic lid, and Fern had given it to me on Wednesday.

"Your father's fund," he'd said. "For emergencies. I held it for him."

I'd opened it, and there were nine thousand and some dollars in ones and fives, crumpled and soft with age.

My father's ten years of small cash, the money he'd kept from the bank, the money I hadn't known existed.

I'd thought of it as a gift from the dead.

Now it was a debt payment.

I put the tin on his porch rail and sat down to wait.

He came around the corner of the house twenty minutes later with a coil of line over his shoulder.

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