Part 3 — The Shoebox
I peeled the last of the tape back with my thumbnail, and the lid came up with a small dry sound.
Inside were birthday cards. Dozens of them, in rubber-banded stacks, and every card had been opened with care and put back in its envelope.
Under the cards lay six crisp envelopes with Social Security stamps on them, unopened. Rochelle had been hiding the mail from the agency, and Teddy had been quietly taking it out of the box by the front door before she could.
“Hid it,” Teddy said again, patting the lid. “Two years. So she cannot.”
Mom started to cry, with her hand still on her chest. Uncle Ulises put his arm around her shoulders.
I counted the money in the cards, because Teddy wanted me to. Six hundred and twenty dollars, exactly, in tens and twenties from the cousins. He had never spent one dollar of it.
Teddy did not know what money was, according to my sister, but he knew what it meant to keep a promise to himself.
Rochelle began to say that she had only been holding it. Uncle Ulises told her, gently but firmly, to stop talking.
On Monday I took the shoebox to window four. Carmen read each of the six letters and put them in order. They were notices of the payee review that Rochelle had never answered, and the last one gave her thirty days.
The office removed her as payee and made me the representative, and began recovering the thirty-seven thousand, four hundred dollars. Rochelle would repay it in monthly amounts taken directly from her own income, with the back-pay of twelve thousand and thirty-six dollars paid out to Teddy in a protected account.
She sold the truck in the spring. The shop closed in the summer. She came to my door in July and said she would like to start over, and asked if I could help her find a job that was not near money. I said I would try.
The first thing we did with the back-pay was drive to the shoe store on Ventura Boulevard. Teddy tried on four pairs of sneakers. He picked the red ones with the Velcro, and he did not want to take them off for the ride home.
He kept the duct tape in the junk drawer anyway, just in case.
On Friday after my route, he was waiting at the screen door before I parked.
“Brenda. Bus?”
“Yep. Bus.”
And we watched Wheel of Fortune, and he clapped for every vowel.