He Gave Me $18, So I Left Him with Nothing novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Eighteen Forty
At the Gaffneys' first-Sunday dinner Katie scratches her allowance card in front of the family and reads $18.40. She stands, leaves with her daughter, and a stranger's truck pulls up: he has been writing to her for five years.
The plates were still warm when my husband slid the gold card across his mother's table.
Eleven of his relatives stopped chewing to watch.
It was the first Sunday of the month, and that meant it was my turn.
"Go on, Kate," Dean said. "Don't keep everybody waiting."
He smiled at his cousins as he said it.
My daughter climbed onto the chair beside mine and put her chin on the tablecloth.
She was four, and she had never seen the card before.
I had always left her with a sitter on the days it came out, and this month the sitter had the flu.
"Is it a game, Mommy?" she whispered.
"Something like that," I said.
Dean's text had come that morning, while I was braiding her hair.
Mom likes things done her way. Just play along. It's a little game, nobody means anything by it.
I had played along for six years.
The card was a scratch-off with a gold coating and a silver box underneath.
Whatever number sat in that box was the money I could spend in the next thirty days without asking my husband first.
Groceries, the pharmacy and Poppy's shoes went on his card, and he reviewed the statement every Friday.
The scratch-off was mine.
His mother had invented it, the year after my father died.
"It teaches a person to value a dollar," Constance had said, and everyone had agreed.
Constance sat at the head of the table now with her reading glasses on their chain, watching my hands.
I took a coin from my purse and started scraping.
Poppy leaned in so close her breath fogged the gold.
The first digit came up.
A one.
Somebody at the far end laughed.
The second digit was an eight.
"Eighteen," Dean's cousin said. "Oh, Dean. Don't be cruel."
The cents came last.
Forty.
"Eighteen dollars and forty cents," Constance read out to the table. "Use it wisely, Katherine."
Dean's cousins laughed again.
Lydia, across from me, did not.
She reached over with her napkin and wiped the silver dust off Poppy's chin.
Then she slid a sugar cookie onto Poppy's plate when nobody was looking.
"Don't worry about it," Lydia said quietly. "It's just how Mom does things. I'll bring your mail by Tuesday, like always."
She had brought my mail in from the box every week for five years.
I had always thought that was kind of her.
Poppy had gone under the table to retrieve her cookie, and I heard her voice come up through the wood, bright and loud.
"Mommy! Somebody wrote on the bottom!"
"Poppy, come out of there," Dean said.
"It says W and B. With a line under it."
I lifted the edge of the tablecloth.
Under the lip of the table, cut into the oak with a knife, were two letters.
I had seen them a thousand times as a girl.
W.B.
Walt Brandt, my father, who had carved his initials into the underside of everything he ever built.
"That's Grandpa Walt's table," I said.
I said it out loud, to the whole room.
I had looked at that table every first Sunday for five years and never once thought to look under it.
"We took it in after the funeral," Constance said. "It was too good to waste."
Nobody had asked me.
I had signed something that day, at the lunch after the burial.
Dean's hand had been on my back, and he had said it was only for the yard.
I could not tell you one word of what it said.
I looked at the card in front of me, with its tidy, silver-dusted number.
I looked at Dean, who was already smiling past me at his cousin, certain that this was the end of it.
And I understood that he had never once expected me to say no.
So I stood up.
My chair scraped the floor, and the whole table turned.
I pushed the gold card back across the cloth until it stopped against Dean's water glass.
"Keep it," I said. "You can have the rest of the month, too."
"Katie," he said, still smiling. "Sit down. You're making a scene."
"Poppy, get your coat."
My daughter came out from under the table, cookie crumbs on her chin, and took my hand.
She did not ask me anything.
She was four, and she knew.
Constance spoke behind me as I reached the door.
"You walk out of this house with exactly what you came in with."
"I know," I said. "Eighteen dollars and forty cents."
I picked up my purse, and we left.
The October air was cold, and the street was empty, and I had no car, because the car was on Dean's insurance.
Poppy's hand was small and warm in mine.
I had made it to the end of the driveway when a truck pulled up at the curb.
The man inside leaned across and rolled the window down.
He was in his late thirties, with a dark beard going grey and a work jacket worn white at the cuffs.
He looked at me, and then at Poppy, and then at the house behind us.
"Katie Brandt?" he said.
Nobody had called me that in six years.
"I'm Clark Holter," he said. "I worked for your father."
He paused.
"I've been writing to you for five years, and I don't think you got one letter."
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