The cash was in bundles held together by rubber bands. The bundles were of various thicknesses, depending on the mix of denominations. Tens were rare, but twenties weren’t. There was no shortage of fifties or hundreds either. I only had to count through four bundles to realize that every bundle held five thousand dollars. And there were three layers of bundles in the shoebox. With four bundles in each layer. Plus six more bundles stuffed around the edges to make the layers snug.
I am well aware that for lots of people in this world, ninety thousand dollars is no big deal. Some people make more than that in a year. Some actors and athletes make that much for an hour or two of work. But I’m not one of those people.
For me, ninety thousand dollars represents two years of dust-sucking work. Three years if you factor in the taxes.
It took a while for the dizziness to pass. I had meant to get all this done quickly, cause I still had the girls to pick up. But for several minutes at least, I couldn’t move except to shiver and rock back and forth with my hands squeezing my knees.
No matter how well a person plans, there’s always something you don’t plan for. I’m talking now about my plan for hiding the cash I’d stolen in Pops’ MISCELLANEOUS box. It had never occurred to me there wouldn’t be enough room in the box for all that money. I sliced through the sealing tape, one neat cut at each end and another down the middle seam on top, and there was all this stuff I’d never expected.
Some of it looked like junk to me at first, though I’m sure Pops thought there was some value to it, or else he wouldn’t have packed it away for me. Two old Kodak cameras that must’ve been from the thirties or forties. Three tiny glass deer, a buck and a doe and a fawn all glued to the same glass base, which I had given Mom on her last Mother’s Day. Pops had given me the five dollars to buy it when we were at Woolworth’s one time, but I’d insisted on holding it in my hands on the ride home, and the thing was so delicate I accidentally broke the buck right off the stand. I could barely breathe I was crying so hard, but Pops glued it back in place when we got home, and as far as I know, Mom never once suspected it had ever been broken.
Then there was a pair of bronzed baby shoes, which I assumed had once been worn by my mother, or maybe by me. Then the heavy-handled knife with a thick ten-inch blade I found in Pops’ closet when I was fourteen, and carried around with me for a week, shoved down into my waistband, until a teacher caught me showing it to a girl and called Pops about it.
Standing on its side in a corner of the cardboard box was Pops’ black fireproof box with the key in the lock, and inside was his will and gold watch, his discharge papers and Purple Cross, three silver dollars and a wallet holding four silver certificates, three two-dollar bills, and six bills all marked with the words NGAN-HANG QUOC-GIA VIET-NAM. The twenties had a picture of a big, impressive building on them, and the 500s had a tiger, and the 1000s had skinny little men riding elephants. I thought it was sort of funny in a touching kind of way to find that Vietnamese money, because when I came home from the desert I handed Pops a little wad of the old, worthless dinar with Saddam’s picture on it, and I told him what he’d always told me when he handed me a dollar when I was little, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
There was also his change jar, a half-gallon Mason jar, and it was filled to the lid with coins of every denomination. The box holding his Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver in his USMC holster was propped up on its side against the jar. Pops taught me to shoot with that gun. We practiced on bottles and cans and rats at the dump until he was convinced I knew how to handle a gun properly. After each trip to the dump he’d watch while I cleaned out the barrel, then the revolver would go back into the holster and under his pillow. Sometimes when he wasn’t around I’d sit on his bed and just hold it. It felt so heavy and solid and, I don’t know, reassuring in my hands. Like I was holding his hand, in a way, which we stopped doing when I hit thirteen or so.
In that same box was his favorite Craftsman wrench set, six heavy wrenches, still gleaming and without a scratch. A small, heavy purse of Gee’s I used to play with all the time, because I liked the feel of it so much. It was made out of tiny metal overlapping plates that shimmered like fish scales. Gee said it had belonged to her own mother, and came from the Roaring Twenties.
Three framed 5 × 7s, one of Pops, one of Gee, and one of my mother, each of them holding me as a baby, all taken on the same day, I guess, seeing as how I was wrapped up in the same blue blanket and had the same goofy smile on my face each time.
Another 5 × 7 that, even as a kid, used to break my heart when I looked at it, and it was impossible not to look at it every day, seeing as how it always sat on top of the television set. It was a picture of Gee when she was only nineteen years old, and on her lap was a chubby little baby boy who looked a lot like a cherub out of a religious painting. This was a photo Gee had taken while Pops was in Asia. It would have been the first look he had of his son. And not long after that it became the only look he’d ever have of him, because the little boy, David Jr., died of pneumonia a few months after the photo was taken.
Back before Mom had me, she asked a friend of hers to use an old photo of Pops in his dress blues, and somehow combine it with the photo of Gee and little Davy. I don’t know if there was such a thing as Photoshop back then or not, but I do know that Gee cherished that photo of the three of them, even though if you got close up the photo of Pops looked like a kind of cutout superimposed behind Gee’s right shoulder. Still, when Pops and Gee took Mom and me in, it was almost like we were a family of five instead of four. Hardly a night passed that Mom didn’t say “Goodnight, Davy,” on her way up the stairs. Later, when she wasn’t able to climb the stairs anymore and slept on a roll-up bed in the dining room, I’d sometimes hear her talking in the middle of the night, and the only thing that kept me from being scared was telling myself she was talking to her brother, Davy.
And there was other stuff in that box too, every piece wrapped in its own sheet of Bubble Wrap, all those worthless, priceless pieces of the past the four of us had shared. I was weak and shaky and teary-eyed from looking at them, even the ones I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and at the same time I felt all dirty and despicable because of those bundles of cash at my feet.
Then my phone beeped in my pocket and nearly shocked me out of my skin. It was a text from the daycare center, reminding me that they closed at six and would I be coming soon? I texted back B there in 10. Then I repacked the box and covered the cut tape with strips of fresh duct tape, one strip over each cut because I knew I would be back to look inside that box again.