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The risk of offending was very real. Working class people in our town didn’t care to be the recipients of charity, despite giving away what little extra they had to others. It was a harsh truth I’d learned by becoming rich: the poor gave to each other more than those with a hundred times their wealth ever offered.
“Oh, no, dear, that’s too expensive,” Mrs. Hanner said, pressing her hand to her sunken chest. “Do you know how much they are?”
“Sophie bought me mine,” Grandma said with pride. Apparently, she was fine with me spending money as long as she could brag about me to her friends. “And my new refrigerator. She’s a billionaire.”
“I know she’s a billionaire, but she won’t be if she gives away all her money,” Mrs. Hanner said. Most people didn’t have a real understanding of how much a billion dollars was; the number was simply absurd.
The thought of that only made me angrier. We were ridiculously rich. Sure, Neil had the rape crisis center, and I was proud of that. But there was more we could be doing, and so much more that other people in our position could do. But it seemed once they hit the max for charitable deductions on their taxes, they just stopped. Because the poor and working class weren’t a sound investment. No one gained anything by buying a poor little old lady a washing machine.
“How about this,” I said, rising to get my purse from the mudroom. I brought it back and pulled out my checkbook. “I’ll write you a check for a thousand dollars. That way, you won’t have to buy top-of-the-line and feel guilty.”
“Sophie, no,” Mrs. Hanner protested, but when I started writing out the check, her protests ceased.
“Let her do it,” Grandma said. “She’s not going to run out of money.”
My god, had the old woman actually listened to me for a change?
I handed over the check. Mrs. Hanner’s hand shook a little as she took it. “Oh, honey. This is just too much.”
“It’s really not. And if you want, you can make it up to me by sending some of your Buckeyes and peanut brittle to me at Christmas.” Honestly, it was a fair trade; her peanut brittle was worth a thousand dollars, at least. Even if I wasn’t supposed to eat it.
When I left for the airport the next morning, I couldn’t help but notice the new siding on some homes that reached only about halfway up. The area had experienced catastrophic flash floods the year before, and it still bore some of the scars. Homeowner’s insurance didn’t always cover that kind of damage.
That was the life I could have been living. If I’d never gone to college, if I’d never met Neil. Both of those things were so unlikely to have happened to anyone. Why had they happened to me?
There was a strange sort of survivor’s guilt that came with a rapid ascent to wealth. Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty, only to find themselves rocketing to an elevated status must have dealt with the same thing. My conscience was always in the back of my mind demanding to know what I’d done to deserve my good fortune. Why was I given such an easy life? For a long time now, I’d reveled in the fact that I could help my family and spoil them with gifts and trips. But that was just my family. I could do so much more.
On the flight back to New York, I scrolled through my phone, searching for ideas for how I could help, but most charities I knew of focused on health issues, not general community improvement. I sighed and headed to a news site. Beneath the infuriating news about our government—which I skipped, because I didn’t feel like having a rage aneurysm mid-flight—was a small picture of Jimmy Carter in a hard hat and goggles, wielding a hammer.
Of course! Habitat For Humanity. That was an organization I could support. They helped exactly the same people that I wanted to help. The working poor, the working class, people like my mom and I had been all those years ago. People who had to put tarps on their roofs and rationed their heat in the winter because it was going to escape their poorly insulated homes, anyway. People who worked hard and deserved basic things like shelter.
And food. My mind raced. There were food banks in the U.P.... How much money did they need to keep servicing their communities? How could I help? How much money would help?
By the time we’d landed, I’d written two checks. One for five-hundred thousand dollars to Habitat For Humanity. The other for a million dollars to the Keweenaw Food Pantry. It was a lot of money. And I realized I should wait to mail them until I knew whether or not it would devastate the organizations with taxes or something. That was something I’d have to learn about, too.
