Chapter 6 - The Feast of Scraps
The letter arrived on a Thursday morning, three weeks after my visit to Salem.
It was delivered by standard certified mail, green return receipt requested.
Thomas signed for it at the front door, using the blunt nub of a pencil he kept behind his ear. He carried the heavy cream envelope into the kitchen, slit the flap with his pocketknife, and sat down at the table.
Eleanor was standing by the stove, browning ground beef for an American goulash. Kaye was leaning against the refrigerator, drinking cold-pressed celery juice from a mason jar.
I was on my knees in the hallway, scrubbing the baseboards with a mixture of vinegar and warm water.
My cast had been removed forty-eight hours earlier. The right hand was still stiff, the skin mottled red and yellow, the knuckles thickened by internal scar tissue that would never completely flatten out. Every time I squeezed the sponge, a dull, electric ache ran up into my elbow.
"What is it, Thomas?" Eleanor asked without turning around.
"It's from the county water district," Thomas said, his brows drawing together as he read the letter through his reading glasses.
He read it once.
Then he read it again.
"Well?" Kaye asked, rolling her eyes. "Is it June's termination notice? Because if she got fired, she can't even pay her four hundred dollars, and I need that space in the garage for my wedding decorations."
"Shut up for a second," Thomas snapped.
His voice had that strange, tight vibration it got when he was trying to calculate odds in his head.
"They're settling," he said.
Eleanor turned around, the wooden spoon dripping tomato sauce onto the yellow linoleum. "Settling what?"
"Her injury," Thomas said, looking over the top of his glasses toward the hallway where I was kneeling with the sponge. "The water district says because she was injured on a weekend during an unpaid break, but within the seventy-two-hour window of her mandatory safety certification, their municipal risk pool is offering a one-time severance and liability release."
He set the letter on the table.
"Eighty-four thousand dollars."
The kitchen went dead silent.
The only sound was the ground beef spitting in the cast-iron skillet.
Kaye slowly lowered her mason jar. Her eyes, wide and glassy, fixed on the paper.
"Eighty-four thousand?" she whispered.
"In a lump-sum settlement check," Thomas said, tapping the document with his thick, scarred thumb. "Payable to June Mercer upon execution of a full liability waiver and a notarized medical release."
Eleanor set the spoon down on the counter with a soft, wet thud.
She walked over to the table. She picked up the letter with two fingers, holding it like a delicate lace doily, and read every word.
"She doesn't know how to handle that kind of money," Eleanor said immediately. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact, completely stripped of any shame. "She'd waste it. She'd give it to some deadbeat or spend it on that boy."
"It's her name on the check, Mom," Kaye said, though her mouth was twitching with greed. "How are you going to get it?"
"She's living under this roof," Eleanor said, turning her cold, pale eyes toward the hallway.
She looked at me.
I stayed on my knees. I kept my head down, my gaze fixed on the dirty gray water in the galvanized bucket between my knees.
"June," Eleanor called out.
The tone was sweet.
It was the tone she used when the preacher came to tea.
"June, darling. Come in here for a moment."
I stood up slowly, wiping my wet, scarred hands on the thighs of my faded work jeans.
I walked into the kitchen. I stopped two paces back from the maple table, my shoulders hunched, my arms folded across my chest in the classic, protective posture of an abused dog expecting a kick.
Thomas pushed the letter toward me.
"The county sent you a settlement," he said. "For your hand."
I picked up the paper with my stiff, trembling fingers. I pretended to read it, though I already knew every word by heart. Sergeant Soto had drafted the document herself on the official letterhead of the County Risk Pool, using an authorized municipal claim number generated through the state’s criminal investigation division.
"Eighty-four thousand?" I whispered, letting my eyes widen with theatrical, childish confusion.
"That's right," Thomas said, leaning back in his chair. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it with a plastic disposable lighter. The blue smoke drifted across the kitchen table, curling around the vinegar fumes.
"Now, here's how this is going to work," Thomas said, pointing the burning tip of the cigarette at my chest. "You're thirty-one. You don't have an investment account. You don't know the first thing about capital gains taxes or federal withholdings. If that check hits your personal checking account, the state will take half of it for back taxes and administrative fees."
"They will?" I asked, my voice small.
"They will," Eleanor chimed in, stepping up beside her husband and resting a hand on his shoulder. "Your father has been talking to his financial advisor at the credit union. The smartest thing—the only responsible thing—is for you to endorse that settlement over to the family trust."
"The family trust?"
We didn't have a family trust.
The only "trust" Thomas Mercer had ever maintained was a joint commercial savings account at the First Coastal Bank that he used to hide his non-taxed income from his weekend backhoe rentals.
"We'll manage the principal," Thomas said, his voice dropping into that soothing, fraudulent tone he used when trading in a car with a cracked engine block. "We'll pay your medical bills out of it. We'll set up a five-hundred-dollar monthly allowance for you and Ethan. And we'll use thirty-five thousand of it to clear the mortgage on this house so you and the boy will always have a roof over your heads."
"And Kaye's wedding?" I asked, looking directly at my sister.
Kaye didn't even look embarrassed. She smiled, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
"Well, obviously, as part of the family, you'd want to contribute to the venue. I mean, it's a botanical garden, June. You're going to be in the photos. You don't want the family looking poor in front of the Montgomerys, do you?"
I looked at the three of them.
Thomas, with his cigarette and his heavy, calloused boots.
Eleanor, with her grease-spotted apron and her church-choir smile.
Kaye, with her fifteen-hundred-dollar telephone and her borrowed life.
They were not a family.
They were a pack of jackals standing over an elk carcass in the high desert, snarling over who got the liver and who got the marrow bones, completely blind to the red dot of the hunter's laser settled between their shoulder blades.
"I have to sign the release at the courthouse," I said, pointing to the bottom paragraph of the fraudulent letter. "It says it has to be executed in the presence of the clerk of the circuit court in Salem."
"Salem?" Thomas frowned. "Why the hell can't we do it at the branch in Tillamook?"
"It says 'County Risk Pool administrative oversight requires state circuit court verification for all municipal dismemberment settlements exceeding fifty thousand dollars,'" I recited, my voice completely devoid of inflection.
Thomas stared at the paper.
He hated Salem. He hated state bureaucrats, he hated traffic, and he hated parking meters.
But eighty-four thousand dollars was eighty-four thousand dollars.
It was the boat barn.
It was Kaye's botanical garden.
It was another five years of sitting in his leather recliner, drinking Coors Light, knowing that the daughter he had tried to murder was scrubbing his toilets for five hundred dollars a month.
"Fine," Thomas said, stubbing the cigarette out in a chipped ceramic saucer. "We go tomorrow morning. Seven o'clock sharp. And don't wear those goddamned torn jeans. Put on a skirt. You look like a vagrant."
"Yes, Thomas," I said.
I backed out of the kitchen.
I walked down the hall, into the small bedroom, and pushed the chest of drawers against the door.
I reached under the mattress and pulled out Ethan's dinosaur backpack.
It was already full.
May you like
Underneath the bed sat my small duffel bag—three pairs of work pants, four shirts, my birth certificate, Ethan's immunization records, and the six hundred dollars in emergency cash I had systematically withdrawn in twenty-dollar increments from my wastewater paycheck over the last three weeks.
I sat on the bed and waited for the sun to go down.
