The Eight Dollars and Forty-Two Cents
The card declined the first time, and the woman tried to smile like it was nothing.
The second time, the little screen flashed red again, and the smile fell off her face.
Behind her, a man in a camouflage cap let out a long, loud sigh. Somebody further back muttered, “Unbelievable.” One of the babies strapped to her chest was screaming so hard his tiny face had turned the color of a strawberry.
The woman looked at me. Her lips were trembling.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Can you take the diapers off?”
I looked down at the screen. She was short $8.42.
And I didn’t know it yet, but that number was about to change my whole life.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning of that day, because the beginning matters. It always does.
That Friday started like every other Friday.
My alarm went off at six. I hit snooze once, then lay there staring at the water stain on my ceiling that looked a little bit like a rabbit. I’d been meaning to get someone to look at the roof for two years. I never had the money.
I could hear my mom in the kitchen. The kettle. The radio playing old country songs low, the way she liked it. The scrape of a chair.
I’m thirty-four years old and I still live with my mother. I used to be embarrassed about that. I’m not anymore. After my dad died, it was just the two of us, and somewhere along the way we stopped being a mother and a daughter who lived together and became two people holding each other up.
I pulled on my work polo, the green one with HOLLIS MARKET stitched over the pocket, and went downstairs.
“Morning, Rae,” Mom said. She was sitting at the table with her coffee and the electric bill. She had a pencil behind her ear. That’s never a good sign.
“How bad?” I asked.
She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It’s not bad. It’s just… it’s a lot for October.”
I sat down across from her and looked at the number. She was right. It was a lot.
“I’ll pick up an extra shift,” I said.
“You already work six days a week.”
“Then I’ll work seven.”
“Rachel.” She said my full name, which meant she was serious. “You can’t keep doing that. You’re going to run yourself into the ground.”
“Dad worked seven days a week sometimes.”
She went quiet. She always does when I bring him up. Not sad quiet, exactly. More like she’s listening to something far away.
“Your father,” she finally said, “was a stubborn fool who never knew when to stop.”
“I know.”
“You’re just like him.”
“I know that too.”
She smiled then, a little. She reached over and squeezed my hand. Her fingers were cold. They’re always cold in the mornings.
“Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late. And take a banana. You never eat breakfast.”
I took the banana. I didn’t eat it. It sat on the passenger seat of my car all day, getting browner, like it does every day.
My car is a 2009 Honda with a cracked windshield and a check engine light that has been on so long I think of it as decoration. That morning it made a new noise when I turned the key. A kind of grinding cough.
“Not today,” I told it. “Please. Not today.”
It started on the third try. I patted the dashboard like it was a horse.
On the drive to work I did math in my head. That’s what I do. I do math everywhere. In the shower, in line at the bank, lying in bed at night. Rent we split. The electric bill. Mom’s prescriptions. Insurance on the car. Whatever that new noise was going to cost. My paycheck didn’t come until next Thursday, and I had exactly sixty-one dollars in my checking account.
Sixty-one dollars. I remember the number because I’d checked it twice that morning.
Millbrook is a small town. One stoplight, two churches, a hardware store, a diner called Patty’s that has served the same meatloaf special every Tuesday since 1987, and Hollis Market, where I’ve worked for six years.
When you work the register in a town this size, you don’t just know people. You know their lives. You know who’s on a diet because they stopped buying the ice cream. You know who’s having money trouble because they switched from the name brand cereal to the store brand. You know who’s pregnant before their own mothers do, because of the ginger ale and the saltines and the way they look at the prenatal vitamins.
I pulled into the employee lot at 6:52. Lori’s car was already there. Lori is always early. She’s sixty-three, has worked at Hollis since before I could walk, and she knows everything about everybody. She calls herself the town’s unofficial newspaper.
“You look tired,” she said when I walked in.
“Good morning to you too, Lori.”
“I’m just saying. You’ve got bags under your eyes like suitcases.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind.”
She laughed and handed me a cup of coffee from the break room. “Drink. You’ll need it. Mike says the truck’s late again and we’re short on stockers.”
Mike Delgado is our store manager. He’s a big guy, with a gray beard and reading glasses he keeps pushed up on his forehead and always forgets about. He looks grumpy. He sounds grumpy. But I’ve seen him slip a gallon of milk to an old man who forgot his wallet, and I’ve seen him drive an hour in a snowstorm to bring a cashier’s forgotten insulin to her house. He just doesn’t like anyone to know he’s soft.
“Hale,” he called when he saw me. He calls everyone by their last name. “Register three today. Lori’s on two.”
“Got it.”
I walked to register three and did what I do every single morning. I opened the drawer, counted the float, wiped down the belt, and checked that the little photo was still there.
It’s a small photo. Wallet sized. It’s taped to the side of the register, just below the scanner, where I can see it but most customers can’t unless they’re really looking.
It’s my dad.
He’s standing beside his truck, a big blue Peterbilt, with his arms crossed and a grin on his face like he just heard the best joke in the world. He’s wearing his old Carhartt jacket and a baseball cap pushed back on his head. You can see his watch on his wrist, catching the sun. That watch was the only nice thing he ever owned. My mom bought it for him on their tenth anniversary. She saved for almost a year.
He died when I was twelve. Black ice on Route 9, on a night in March. He was coming home early because he missed us.
I keep the photo there because my dad used to say something to me, back when I was little and complaining about the world not being fair.
“You can’t fix the whole world, Rae-bug,” he’d say. “But you can fix the next ten minutes for somebody.”
I touch the corner of the photo every morning before my first customer. It’s a silly habit. I know that. But I’ve done it for six years, and I wasn’t going to stop.
“Morning, Dad,” I whispered.
Then the doors slid open, and my day began.
Fridays are busy. Payday for half the town. By ten I’d rung up Mrs. Kowalski’s prune juice and cat food, the Jensen boys’ energy drinks and beef jerky, and a whole cart of party supplies for little Emma Tate’s seventh birthday. Her mother showed me a picture of the cake on her phone. It was shaped like a unicorn and slightly lopsided.
“It’s perfect,” I told her.
“It’s a disaster,” she laughed.
“Perfect disaster, then.”
By noon I’d eaten half a sleeve of crackers from my bag and still not touched the banana. By three my feet hurt. By five the after-work rush started and the lines got long, and everyone got a little short-tempered the way people do when they’re hungry and tired and just want to get home.
At 6:40, she walked in.
I noticed her right away. You notice strangers in a town like Millbrook. They stand out like a red sock in a load of whites.
She was thin. Not skinny, thin. The kind of thin that comes from skipping meals so somebody else can eat. Her hair was in long braids pulled back with a rubber band. She wore a gray hoodie that was too big for her and jeans worn white at the knees.
And on her chest, in a big black twin carrier, were two babies.
They couldn’t have been more than four or five months old. Both boys, I guessed, from the little blue hats. One was sound asleep with his mouth open and his tiny fist curled against his mother’s collarbone. The other was awake, and he was not happy about it.
He was crying the way only small babies can cry. Not just loud. Desperate. Like the whole universe had betrayed him.
The woman kept bouncing gently on her feet as she walked the aisles, whispering to him. “Shh, shh, I know, baby. I know. We’re almost done. Mama’s almost done.”
She didn’t have a cart. She carried everything in her arms. When she came to my line, there were already four people ahead of her and the line kept growing behind her.
I watched her while I rang up the others. She kept looking at the things in her arms. Then she’d look at her phone. Then back at the things. Her lips were moving like she was counting.
I know that look. I’ve worn that look. I wore it that morning in my own car.
The man right behind her was Dale Pruitt. Dale runs a small auto body shop on the edge of town. He’s not a bad man, but he’s not a patient one either. He had a case of beer, a frozen pizza, and a look on his face like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
The crying baby screamed louder. Dale sighed loudly enough for the whole store to hear.
Finally she reached me.
“Hi there,” I said. “Find everything okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Her voice was soft, with an accent I couldn’t place. Somewhere south, maybe. She set down a gallon of milk, a can of baby formula, and a pack of diapers. Size two. The cheapest brand we carry.
That was it. That was everything.
“Oh, they’re beautiful,” I said, nodding at the babies. “Twins?”
“Yes.” She tried to smile. “This one’s Noah. He’s the loud one. And this sleepy one is Eli.”
“Hi, Noah,” I said. “You’re having a rough day, huh?”
Noah answered by screaming directly into his mother’s ear. She winced and laughed at the same time.
“He’s hungry,” she said. “And wet. And mad at me. Mostly mad at me.”
“Well, he’s got good lungs.”
“He’s got his father’s lungs,” she said, and something flickered across her face. Something closed, like a door.
I scanned the milk. The formula. The diapers. I told her the total.
She tapped her card on the reader.
The little machine beeped, thought about it, and flashed a word on the screen.
DECLINED.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s… that’s weird. Let me try again.”
She pulled the card back and tapped it again. Her hand was shaking so badly she missed the reader the first time and had to tap it twice.
Beep.
DECLINED.
Behind her, Dale Pruitt let out the longest sigh I’ve ever heard a human being make. “Are you kidding me?” he said, not quite under his breath. “It’s Friday night.”
Someone further back said, “Can we open another register?”
The woman’s cheeks went red. Deep red, all the way down her neck. She started digging through her diaper bag with one hand while trying to bounce Noah with the other. She pulled out a wallet. Opened it. Inside, I could see a library card, a folded piece of paper, and a few coins.
She counted the coins. I watched her count them. Her lips moved.
Then she closed the wallet and looked down at the counter.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Can you take the diapers off?”
I looked at the screen. With the diapers removed, she’d have enough for the milk and the formula. With them, she was short $8.42.
Eight dollars and forty-two cents.
It’s such a small number. People drop that much on a coffee and a muffin without thinking. But I’ve seen what eight dollars can mean. I’ve seen people put back bread. I’ve seen kids put back birthday candles. I’ve seen my own mother, years ago, put back a pack of chicken and stand there in the checkout line with her chin up like she’d meant to all along.
And here was this woman, with two babies strapped to her chest, one of them screaming, and she was choosing between milk and diapers. Between feeding them and keeping them dry.
I thought about my sixty-one dollars. I thought about the electric bill and the grinding noise in my car. I thought about it for maybe one second.
Then I thought about my dad. The photo was right there under my hand. His grin.
You can fix the next ten minutes for somebody.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my own debit card.
“Ma’am,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ve got it.”
She looked up so fast she almost knocked the formula off the counter. “What? No. No, no, no. You don’t have to do that.”
But I’d already tapped my card. The machine beeped. APPROVED.
The receipt started printing.
Her eyes filled with tears. Just like that, all at once, like a dam breaking. She put her hand over her mouth.
“No,” she said again, softer. “You don’t have to. I don’t… I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you back.”
I smiled at her. I tore off the receipt and put it in her bag with the diapers.
“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Just take your groceries home and please don’t worry about it.”
She stood there. She didn’t move. Behind her, Dale shifted his feet and opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, and then he looked at her face and closed it again.
The woman was staring at me. Then her eyes moved down. Down to my hand, resting on the edge of the register.
Down to the photo.
I saw it happen. I saw her look at the photo of my dad, and I saw all the color leave her face. It was like watching someone see a ghost. Her mouth opened a little. Her hand, the one on Noah’s back, went completely still.
“Ma’am?” I said. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t answer. She just stared at that photo.
“Ma’am?”
She blinked hard. She looked back up at me, and her eyes were wet all over again, but different this time. Wider. Searching my face like she was trying to read something written there.
“What’s…” she started. Then she stopped. She shook her head.
Noah screamed. Eli woke up and joined him. Now both babies were crying, and the line behind her was a dozen people long, and somebody near the back said, “Come on, people,” and the moment broke apart like a soap bubble.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Of course.”
She grabbed her bag. She took two steps. She turned back.
“Thank you,” she said again. “You have no idea. You have no idea what this means to me. Today. Today of all days.”
“It’s really nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” She said it almost fiercely. “It’s not nothing. Thank you.”
She thanked me three more times on her way to the door. The last time she was halfway out, with the automatic doors trying to close on her and opening again, and she looked back over her shoulder, not at me, but at the register.
At the photo.
Then she was gone.
Dale stepped up and put his beer on the belt without a word. He didn’t look at me. I scanned the beer, then the pizza.
“Thirty-one sixteen,” I said.
He paid in cash. When I handed him his change, he held onto it for a second.
“That was a nice thing you did,” he said gruffly. He still wasn’t looking at me.
“She needed it.”
“Yeah.” He shoved the change into his pocket. “Yeah. I guess she did.”
He walked out. I watched him go. He stopped by the door and looked out at the parking lot for a long moment, like he was looking for someone. Then he shook his head and went to his truck.
The rest of my shift was a blur. Mrs. Abernathy and her coupons. A teenager trying to buy cigarettes with an ID that said he was born in 1971. A spilled jar of pickles in aisle four that made the whole front of the store smell like vinegar.
But I kept thinking about her face. The way she looked at the photo. Like she’d been punched.
At ten, Mike came by to close out my drawer.
“Lori says you paid for a customer’s groceries,” he said, counting bills.
“Only eight dollars.”
“Hm.” He wrote a number down. “You know we’re not supposed to do that. Policy.”
“I know.”
“Hm,” he said again. He snapped a rubber band around the twenties. “Go home, Hale. You look like a ghost.”
On my way out I passed the break room and saw my banana on the counter where I’d brought it in from the car, completely black now. I threw it away. I wasn’t hungry anyway.
The car started on the first try that night. I took that as a sign.
When I got home, the kitchen light was on. Mom was waiting up like she always does, even though I’ve told her a hundred times not to. She was in her robe, with a cup of chamomile tea and a crossword puzzle.
“There’s soup on the stove,” she said. “Potato.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
I ladled some into a bowl and sat down across from her. I ate three spoonfuls before I realized I was starving.
“Long day?” she asked.
“Long day.”
She filled in a word. Then she looked at me over her glasses. “Something happened.”
“How do you do that?”
“I’m your mother. Spill.”
So I told her. The woman. The twins. The declined card. The eight dollars and forty-two cents. I left out the part about my sixty-one dollars, because I knew she’d worry, but she’s not stupid. She knew.
When I finished, she put down her pencil and was quiet for a long time.
“Your father,” she said finally, “used to do that. All the time.”
“I know. You’ve told me.”
“No, Rae. I mean all the time. It used to make me crazy. We’d be short on the mortgage and he’d come home and tell me he’d paid for some stranger’s tank of gas at a truck stop in Ohio.” She shook her head and laughed softly. “One time he came home without his coat. In December. Gave it to a kid hitchhiking outside Pittsburgh.”
“I didn’t know that one.”
“I was so mad at him. I yelled. I told him he couldn’t save everybody.” She turned her teacup slowly on the table. “And you know what he said?”
“You can’t fix the whole world,” I said quietly. “But you can fix the next ten minutes for somebody.”
My mom looked at me with shining eyes. “He said that to you too?”
“All the time.”
“Well.” She picked up her pencil again and pretended to look at her crossword. “He was a stubborn fool.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I miss him every day.”
“I know.”