I sat there for a long time.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” I said.
The mockingbird sang.
“I’ve never had anything that was mine,” I said. “Not like this. I don’t know how to spend it on myself.”
I thought about it.
I thought about my mother. Sixty-four years old. A widow. Who didn’t know how to write a check.
Who sat on the bed with me three days before she died and said, Find one thing that’s yours.
She didn’t say, Keep it.
She said, Put your name on it.
The first thing I did was pay June’s hospital bill.
Fifty-three thousand, four hundred dollars. The gap her insurance didn’t cover. For her third heart surgery.
I drove to Erlanger myself. I walked into the financial counseling office on the second floor. A young woman with braids looked up from her desk.
“Can I help you?”
“My sister is June Whitmire Patterson,” I said. “She had a valve replacement in September. She owes fifty-three thousand dollars. I’d like to pay it.”
The young woman looked at me.
“All of it?”
“All of it,” I said.
She ran my card.
She printed a receipt.
She handed it to me.
At the bottom, there was a line.
Signature.
I signed it.
Patricia Ann Whitmire.
June cried for an hour when I told her.
She was home by then. In her trailer. In a recliner. With her legs up. Her color was better. Her lips were pink.
“Patty,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
“I know.”
“That’s your money. That’s yours.”
I sat on the arm of her recliner.
I took her hand.
“June,” I said. “Do you remember what was on the back of the ticket? The one that won?”
She shook her head.
I took out my phone. I showed her the photo of it. Front and back.
Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
Week 988. June’s in the hospital again. Third surgery. Please.
June stared at it.
“You wrote my name,” she said.
“I wrote your name,” I said. “On the one that won.”
June put her hand over her mouth.
“So it’s yours too,” I said.
I paid off Robby’s mortgage.
A little three-bedroom in Rocky Face. He’s been paying on it for eight years. He has two little girls. Lily Rose and Hazel. He works twelve-hour shifts on the power lines in all weather.
He called me when the bank sent him the letter.
He couldn’t talk. He just kept saying Mama. Mama. Mama.
I paid off Tessa’s nursing school loans.
Forty-one thousand dollars. She’s been paying two hundred a month since 2017. She told me once she’d be paying them until she was fifty.
She came over that night. With Biscuit the cat in a carrier. She sat at my kitchen table and cried into a glass of sweet tea.
“Mama,” she said. “What are you going to keep for yourself?”
I sent Kyle a check.
He’s at Fort Stewart. He’s saving for a ring. He told me in June. There’s a girl named Marisol. A nurse at Winn Army Community Hospital. He wants to marry her.
I sent him a check for twenty thousand dollars.
In the memo line, I wrote: Not from Kmart.
I gave some away.
Ten thousand to the Walker County Health Department. For the immunization program. So no child in Walker County gets turned away for a shot because their family can’t pay.
Ten thousand to the Hamilton Medical Center cancer unit. For the hospice program. For the nurses who taught me how to give my mother morphine.
Twenty-five thousand to the Dalton Public Library. To start a financial literacy class.
For women.
Over fifty.
Who’ve never written a check.
They call it the Ruby Whitmire Class.
It meets on Tuesday mornings. In the community room. Twelve women at a time. Retired mill workers. Widows. Divorcées. Wives.
A volunteer from the credit union teaches them.
How to open a bank account in their own name.
How to read a mortgage statement.
How to check a credit report.
How to find out if there’s a bank account in Chattanooga they don’t know about.
I go every week.
I sit in the back.
And I did one more thing.
The Highway 41 Gas & Go needed a new roof.
Mr. Mehta mentioned it in July. Not to ask. He’d never ask. Just in passing. When I came in for gas.
“The rain,” he said. “It comes through by the lottery machine. I have put a bucket.”
I paid for the roof.
Mr. Mehta tried to refuse. He said it wasn’t right. He said he was only doing his job.
“Mr. Mehta,” I said. “For nineteen years, you witnessed my name. Every single week. Even when you had your gallbladder out.”
He looked at me.
“You kept a binder,” I said. “Nine hundred and eighty-eight pages. Nobody asked you to. Nobody paid you to.”
He didn’t say anything.
“When Gary tried to take my ticket,” I said, “the only reason he couldn’t was because you’d been standing at that counter for nineteen years. Saying, Yes. She signed it. I saw.”
