- I sat there for a long time.
- “I don’t know what to do with it,” I said.
- The mockingbird sang.
- “I’ve never had anything that was mine,” I said. “Not like this. I don’t know how to spend it on myself.”
- I thought about it.
- I thought about my mother. Sixty-four years old. A widow. Who didn’t know how to write a check.
- Who sat on the bed with me three days before she died and said, Find one thing that’s yours.
- She didn’t say, Keep it.
- She said, Put your name on it.
- The first thing I did was pay June’s hospital bill.
- Fifty-three thousand, four hundred dollars. The gap her insurance didn’t cover. For her third heart surgery.
- I drove to Erlanger myself. I walked into the financial counseling office on the second floor. A young woman with braids looked up from her desk.
- “Can I help you?”
- “My sister is June Whitmire Patterson,” I said. “She had a valve replacement in September. She owes fifty-three thousand dollars. I’d like to pay it.”
- The young woman looked at me.
- “All of it?”
- “All of it,” I said.
- She ran my card.
- She printed a receipt.
- She handed it to me.
- At the bottom, there was a line.
- Signature.
- I signed it.
- Patricia Ann Whitmire.
- June cried for an hour when I told her.
- She was home by then. In her trailer. In a recliner. With her legs up. Her color was better. Her lips were pink.
- “Patty,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
- “I know.”
- “That’s your money. That’s yours.”
- I sat on the arm of her recliner.
- I took her hand.
- “June,” I said. “Do you remember what was on the back of the ticket? The one that won?”
- She shook her head.
- I took out my phone. I showed her the photo of it. Front and back.
- Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
- Week 988. June’s in the hospital again. Third surgery. Please.
- June stared at it.
- “You wrote my name,” she said.
- “I wrote your name,” I said. “On the one that won.”
- June put her hand over her mouth.
- “So it’s yours too,” I said.
- I paid off Robby’s mortgage.
- A little three-bedroom in Rocky Face. He’s been paying on it for eight years. He has two little girls. Lily Rose and Hazel. He works twelve-hour shifts on the power lines in all weather.
- He called me when the bank sent him the letter.
- He couldn’t talk. He just kept saying Mama. Mama. Mama.
- I paid off Tessa’s nursing school loans.
- Forty-one thousand dollars. She’s been paying two hundred a month since 2017. She told me once she’d be paying them until she was fifty.
- She came over that night. With Biscuit the cat in a carrier. She sat at my kitchen table and cried into a glass of sweet tea.
- “Mama,” she said. “What are you going to keep for yourself?”
- I sent Kyle a check.
- He’s at Fort Stewart. He’s saving for a ring. He told me in June. There’s a girl named Marisol. A nurse at Winn Army Community Hospital. He wants to marry her.
- I sent him a check for twenty thousand dollars.
- In the memo line, I wrote: Not from Kmart.
- I gave some away.
- Ten thousand to the Walker County Health Department. For the immunization program. So no child in Walker County gets turned away for a shot because their family can’t pay.
- Ten thousand to the Hamilton Medical Center cancer unit. For the hospice program. For the nurses who taught me how to give my mother morphine.
- Twenty-five thousand to the Dalton Public Library. To start a financial literacy class.
- For women.
- Over fifty.
- Who’ve never written a check.
- They call it the Ruby Whitmire Class.
- It meets on Tuesday mornings. In the community room. Twelve women at a time. Retired mill workers. Widows. Divorcées. Wives.
- A volunteer from the credit union teaches them.
- How to open a bank account in their own name.
- How to read a mortgage statement.
- How to check a credit report.
- How to find out if there’s a bank account in Chattanooga they don’t know about.
- I go every week.
- I sit in the back.
- And I did one more thing.
- The Highway 41 Gas & Go needed a new roof.
- Mr. Mehta mentioned it in July. Not to ask. He’d never ask. Just in passing. When I came in for gas.
- “The rain,” he said. “It comes through by the lottery machine. I have put a bucket.”
- I paid for the roof.
- Mr. Mehta tried to refuse. He said it wasn’t right. He said he was only doing his job.
- “Mr. Mehta,” I said. “For nineteen years, you witnessed my name. Every single week. Even when you had your gallbladder out.”
- He looked at me.
- “You kept a binder,” I said. “Nine hundred and eighty-eight pages. Nobody asked you to. Nobody paid you to.”
- He didn’t say anything.
- “When Gary tried to take my ticket,” I said, “the only reason he couldn’t was because you’d been standing at that counter for nineteen years. Saying, Yes. She signed it. I saw.”
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