“I found it in Mama’s flour tin.”
He looked from the stacks of bills to the envelope.
“Probably grocery money she forgot about.”
We counted everything and arrived at $18,940, far too much money to dismiss as forgotten grocery cash. My hands were already shaking when I opened the envelope and found three handwritten pages inside.
The first sentence immediately stopped me.
“I’m sorry, Linda.”
Then I read the next line.
“I should have told you what Wayne did with your settlement.”
I lowered myself into Mama’s usual kitchen chair as memories from more than thirty years earlier came rushing back. When I was seventeen, a delivery truck had backed into me outside a grocery store, leaving me with serious injuries and forcing me to miss weeks of school.
The trucking company’s insurance eventually offered a settlement, and my stepfather Wayne handled all the paperwork. He told Mama and me that the settlement had been $42,000, most of which supposedly went toward medical bills, while whatever remained would be kept in an account until I turned eighteen.
