I sat down on my own porch step with that envelope and I did not get up again for about eleven minutes.
Junie slept through all of it. The coffee went cold on the kitchen counter in two cups.
It was an envelope. Small, brown, soft at the corners from being carried. The kind that has been in a bag for a long time with other things.
Inside it there was money and there was one page.
Two hundred and twelve dollars.
A hundred-dollar note, two twenties, a ten, and the rest in fives and ones — with four of the ones so soft and so worn that they were nearly cloth.
I counted it three times sitting on that step in the wet. Not because I doubted it. Because I could not think of anything else to do with my hands.
That was not an amount somebody had left over.
Nobody has a hundred, two twenties and a ten by accident. That is an amount somebody has got to — in stages, over a long time, by not spending things.
And the page was four lines, in capitals, in pencil, on paper torn out of something.
He writes, in the first line, that it is not a thank-you for the dinner.
He is very clear about that. He underlines not.
He writes that he has been carrying that money for seven months.
Seven. Through a winter. In a backpack, on a street, with nowhere to put anything down.
He writes that it was for a bus — a particular bus, to a particular town four hours away, and that he had been going to get it on the Saturday.
That Saturday. Two days after my porch.
And then there is the fourth line, which is the one I have read about four hundred times and which I am going to put down as close to his words as I can manage.
He writes that he heard what I said at the door.
