“Seat,” Amy finished, and she let out a long, shaky breath. “Daddy hid the proof under the seat of the mower, Mama. In the tobacco tin, wrapped in electrical tape, where only he would think to look. He knew Jason would be after the mower the minute he was gone.” DeShawn, who was sitting on my steps with his cap in his hands, looked at the ground. He was a polite boy, and I could see he wished he could be anywhere else. I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Honey,” I said, “you did right to bring it. Come in and sit at the table.”
I cut the tape with kitchen scissors. Inside the tin lay three things, folded in wax paper: a bank deposit slip, a photograph, and a note in the pencil of Otis. The slip was for four thousand dollars in cash, deposited in the account of Jason, dated the week the mower went missing. The photograph showed Jason on the porch of my own house, at night, with the door of my old chest freezer lifted behind him. And on the note, in small square letters, Otis had written, He took the rolled bills out of the coffee can in the freezer. Nine thousand dollars. Let it go for the sake of Amy, but do not let him near your money.
Nine thousand dollars. I sat looking at the photograph, remembering the coffee can. Otis and I had kept our emergency cash in the bottom of the deep freeze for forty years, because he said no burglar had ever once checked under the ice cream. When Otis said to me one winter that the can was empty, I had assumed he had spent it on his tomato frames. I had never asked. I looked at my daughter. Amy had turned her face to the wall. “Mama,” she said in a whisper, “I knew. Jason confessed to me. He said he had a gambling debt.”
A tin of old buttons can hold up the whole truth, if the man who hid it hid it well.
I let the silence stand. It is a useful tool, silence. In sixty years of marriage and fifty of mothering, I have found that nobody can bear it very long. Amy broke first. She related the rest in a low, ragged voice. Jason had been to an online casino every night for three years. He had lost the savings of the family, and the money from the will of her mother, and the retirement account at his job. When the freezer money went, the debt was eleven thousand dollars, and he had been afraid to tell her. He thought I would never miss the can.
“Then why did he want the mower?” I asked. Amy wiped her nose with a paper napkin. “Because he knew the tin was under it, Mama. Daddy had said to him once, in anger, that he had hidden the proof. Jason figured it was somewhere on the property. When you said you were thinking of selling, he wanted to get his hands on that mower before anybody else could.” She looked up, and her eyes were bloodshot. “He said to me last night that if you ever opened it, he would lose his job and probably go to jail. So I made him drive me here this morning.” She gave a short laugh. “He sat in the car.”
I went out to the porch myself. Jason was in the driver seat of the sedan, in his work shirt, staring through the windshield with a face that was at once furious and terrified. I opened the passenger door and sat beside him. He did not look at me. I laid the photograph on the dashboard. “Jason,” I said, “you are going to repay every dime, in monthly payments, to me and to this family, for as long as it takes. You will go to the meetings at the church on Tuesday nights. And you will never, ever lie to my daughter again.” His shoulders began to shake. “Yes, Mama Lou,” he said.
He kept every promise. He paid back nine thousand dollars in thirty months, in tidy envelopes marked with the month. He went to the meetings and, after the first year, started to lead one. He took a second job at the hardware store on Saturdays and found, to his own astonishment, that he enjoyed it. The online casino closed his account, and Amy changed all the passwords in the house. They sold the second car. And on the first Saturday after the last envelope arrived, he knocked on my back door and handed me a coffee can.
It was my old can, the dented Folgers, wiped clean and tied with a ribbon. Inside lay nine one hundred dollar bills. “Mama Lou,” he said, “I know this does not replace what I did. But I wanted you to have it back the way it was.” I put the lid on the can. I did not cry. I set it on the counter, and I took his big awkward hand in both of mine, and I patted it, as I would pat the hand of a boy who had finally learned to ride a bicycle. “Jason,” I said, “this is the best business you have ever started.”
DeShawn kept the mower, of course. He kept my lawn too, for nothing, as agreed. By summer, he had added eleven yards, and by fall, twenty. His mother quit her second job. I helped him buy a trailer and a good set of trimmers, and I painted a sign for the door of his pickup. It said, in green letters, Otis Mowing Service. He cried when he saw it, and then he asked me if it was all right to use the name of my husband. I said Otis would have been pleased as a peacock.
Last Saturday, I sat on my freshly repaired front porch with a glass of sweet tea, watching a green mower trace long straight lines across my acre, back and forth, back and forth, in the slanting light. The straw hat still hung on the seat. Amy sat beside me in the other rocker. Jason was on the lawn behind the mower, picking up sticks. The tobacco tin, filled with buttons again, sat on the mantel inside the window, and I could see it through the glass. “Mama,” Amy said softly, “Daddy would be so proud.” I nodded. “He knew,” I said.