Part 3 — The Bread Bag
The neighbors moved aside, and Mia led me across the grass to the garage as if she were showing me the way to church.
Randy stood in the doorway with his tongs still in his hand, swaying. Nobody stopped him from watching.
The chest freezer in the corner hummed. Mia pointed, and a neighbor lifted the lid. Under the packages of frozen deer meat, wrapped in a bread bag, was a long white envelope.
Inside it was a cashiers check for sixty-one thousand five hundred dollars, made out to me. It was the money from my house on Pine Street, and Randy had not been able to cash it because he needed my signature and my ID.
He had hidden it where he thought nobody would look, because a man who cannot spend money wants it to disappear from his own sight.
For six weeks that check had sat under the venison in the dark, while I counted nails in a ceiling, and not one dollar of it had been spent.
The deputy who arrived was young and polite. He took photographs of the hasp, the padlock and the bucket. He asked me if I wished to go to the hospital, and I said no, I wished to sit down on my own porch step in the sun.
The woman from Adult Protective Services came an hour later with a clipboard. She sat beside me for a long time and wrote down everything I said.
Randy was arrested for false imprisonment, and the pension checks were flagged. But he had a good lawyer from the public defenders office, and the judge in Craighead County offered him something I had not expected. He could plead to the charge, enter a residential treatment program, and work off what he owed.
I told the judge in plain words that I wanted my son sober more than I wanted him punished. I also told her that he was not to come near a door with a lock on it.
The check went into a new account at a credit union, in my name only. Mia was named the beneficiary of nothing, but she got the first twenty dollars of the interest.
Her mother took her away for a month to her sisters in Memphis, and they returned with a quiet kind of peace.
I moved into a small apartment near Mia school with a deadbolt on the inside only. Every morning at five I fed the birds with Ruths coffee can.
The little cardinals came one by one, and Mia named them. “That one is Lincoln,” she said. “He is on time.”