“Clara?” I whispered. The name tasted like old dust in my mouth. “Clara Vance left town when her daddy lost the parsonage over on Elm Street. That was right after the mill closed down.”
“She didn’t leave until she had to,” Ray said quietly. He leaned his forearms against the counter and looked down at the wood grain. “She came in here three days before Christmas in ninety-six. Her baby was six months old, and she had a little silver band her grandmother gave her. She needed eighty dollars for formula and coal. Arthur was standing right over there by the ammo cases when she laid it on the glass.”
I remembered that winter. It was the one where the pipes in the basement froze solid and we had to thaw them with a propane torch while the wind whistled through the floorboards. Arthur had been working double shifts at the lumber yard, coming home with his eyebrows frosted white and his boots stiff as frozen leather. I thought every penny he made was going into the jar behind the flour canister for our truck insurance.
“He gave her the eighty dollars?” I asked.
“He gave her a hundred,” Ray corrected. “And then when the ticket came due the next December, she didn’t show up. Arthur did. He paid the interest, renewed the ticket, and told me if she ever came back for it, I was to hand it over and tell her the church fund covered it. She never did come back. She moved down around Cairo, I think. Worked the counter at the diner down by the tracks.”
Ray reached into the back of the cigar box and pulled out a small, folded piece of lined notebook paper. It was torn from a spiral notebook, the blue ink slightly faded where a thumb had held it. He handed it to me like it was something fragile that might break if the air hit it too hard.
“She didn’t write it,” Ray said softly. “Arthur did. On the back of the envelope, after she dropped the baby off with her sister that first afternoon.”
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