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With that, he walked into the kitchen, and then went straight through and out the other side.
What the hell?
For about two minutes, Marcella sat alone in Eight Ball’s postage-stamp breakfast nook, feeling like she’d been locked into a police interrogation room.
Then he was back, holding a folded-over paper sack. He set it on the table next to her coffee mug and took up the chair beside her.
“What’s this?”
“Open and see.”
When Marcella and Yvonne were kids, before the divorce, their next-door neighbors, the Schmitzes, had a sweet cat named Queenie. Queenie had the run of the neighborhood and considered almost everybody around to be her people. She left little gifts, ranging from freshly killed critters to pilfered garden gewgaws to leaves and flowers, on everybody’s porches, and if she was lucky enough to find you outside waiting to receive one of her gifts, she got a light in her eyes and basked in the gratitude she assumed you felt.
Eight had just exactly that same light in his eyes.
She hoped it wasn’t a dead animal in that sack—but with Eight, who knew?
Warily drawing it closer, Marcella unfolded the top of the sack and, with a breath for strength, peered in.
Stacks of cash, neatly bundled with rubber bands. “What the fuck is this?”
Eight cleared his throat, and Marcella heard a touch of anxiety. “I … uh … had to guess at what was fair, but I figured a thousand a month sounded right. Ten years at a thousand a month.”
The first thing Marcella understood: Eight was talking about child support. It took her another second or two to understand that the bundled cash in the sack was his idea of back child support.
He’d handed her a sack of cash for child support.
Then she finally did the math herself and realized how much money was in that sack. Her eyes flew up and fixed on him. “This is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars?”
His expression fought a war between pleased and worried. “Yeah. Is it not enough?”
“You just dropped a hundred and twenty grand in cash in my lap?”
“On the table, but yeah.” He cocked his head, and worry won the battle for his face. “You’re mad?”
“Stunned. I’m stunned. And … what the hell am I supposed to do with a hundred and twenty grand incash?”
Her angel and devil stood silent on her shoulders, just as stunned and confused. Some other voice in her head pointed out that Eight had just handed her Ajax’s entire college education, or the rest of his school expenses all the way through twelfth grade. Sitting right there on the table, Ajax’s ticket to success.
But where did this money come from, and how could she spend it? Could she simply take it to the bank and dump it in her savings? Somehow, she thought that might wave a red flag or two in some federal watchdog office.
Eight would know, no doubt. No doubt most or all of his income came in sacks of cash. He’d bought a house, bikes, a truck, he paid his bills … clearly he knew how to do it without sending up red flags.
“I’m trying to do the right thing. Did I fuck it up?”
The pure confusion and vulnerability pulsing through his rough voice pulled Marcella out of her own confused thoughts. She met his eyes again and saw him struggling to understand what he’d done wrong.
It must be so bewildering to try to learn, at his age, how to give a shit.
“I’m not mad, Eight. I appreciate what this means. Truly, I do. I just … I wasn’t expecting this, at all, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. Where do I put this? How do I use it?” She said the thing that wrapped that sack in barbed wire. “I assume this isn’t a sack of tips you got working at a service station.”
Worry stunted the chuckle he tried. “Uh, no.”
“So I can’t just put it in the bank.”
“You can, but not in one bank, and not on the same day. The money’s clean, but that much cash draws notice.”
“So … if I want to put this aside for Ajax’s college, or his school tuition now, what do I do with it?”
