I wore it anyway.
I wore it for seven years, because we couldn’t afford another.
The only adult at Caldwell High who ever looked at that sleeve and said something about it was Ms. Fairchild, my English teacher.
In ninth grade, she stopped me after class and held up a book of photographs.
Old Japanese work coats, patched and patched again, with bold white stitches across indigo cloth.
“Visible mending,” she said. “They didn’t hide the repair. They sewed it in thread that shows. A mend is how you know something was valued enough to keep.”
I stared at the page.
“Molly, I’m not telling you this to be kind,” she said. “I’m telling you because it’s true.”
I didn’t say anything.
I just went to the bathroom and cried in the last stall, with my hand pressed flat against that red-stitched sleeve.
And that same spring I found the notebook.
I need to go back a few years first, to a night when I was ten.
My mother came home at eleven o’clock, much later than usual, with her boots caked in dust and no money for dinner.
I had been alone since four.
I’d eaten a heel of bread from a brown paper bag and watched the front window, and I was furious, the way only a ten-year-old can be.
“Where were you?”
“I had to take something back.”
“Back where?”
“Out past Tehachapi. About an hour each way.”
“Did they pay you?”
“A hug,” she said, and laughed, tired and soft.
“We can’t eat a hug.”
“No,” she agreed. “But somebody’s mother was looking for that tonight.”
She never told me what it was.
She only washed her hands at the sink and put out the last of the rice.
It was four years later, in the spring of ninth grade, when I found out.
I was on my hands and knees under the kitchen sink, hunting for a leaky pipe, when my fingers hit something that wasn’t plumbing.
A black composition notebook, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.
On the cover, in her careful block capitals, a single word.
RETURNS.
I almost put it back.
Then I opened it.
It was a ledger.
Dates down the left.
Her slanted handwriting down the middle.
A column on the right that said only: Gave back.
I read the first page standing up.
Nov. 12. Brown wallet, $310, license (Mr. T. Lasker). Found in cardboard behind Pelletier’s. Returned same day.
Feb. 3. Dentures in a napkin. Called the number on the case. Returned.
May 19. Wedding ring, gold, size 7. Pawnshop would’ve given $400. Returned to the church office.
There were pages and pages.
Dozens of pages.
In her pencil, in ink, sometimes in the margins of a grocery receipt taped to the paper.
At the very last entry, dated the winter I was ten, I stopped.
