hundreds. At first we put five bills carefully in each envelope, and folded down the flap but didn’t seal it, and put the envelope on the bed. Then we got low on envelopes and put ten bills in each one. Then twenty. Sonja gave me a tweezers and I fished the last bills out of the wrists and ankles of the doll. Sonja used a flashlight to peer down the doll’s neck. At last, I put the head back on.
Put it back in the bag, said Sonja.
She wiped her wrist across her forehead and upper lip. Her face was covered with beads of sweat although the heat hadn’t reached inside the house yet.
She flapped her arms up and down, patted her armpits.
Phew. Go out in the kitchen and get me some water. I gotta change my shirt.
I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The well on the place sucked up sweet water. Sonja always kept a jug of it cold. I poured water into a Pabst Blue Ribbon glass—they collected beer glasses—and drank it down. Then I filled it back up for Sonja. I guess I wanted her to drink out of the same glass as me, though I really wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how much money might be in the envelopes. I went back in and Sonja had a fresh shirt on—pink and gray stripes that pulled wide across her chest. The shirt had a stiff white collar and a buttoned tab. She drank the water.
Whew, she said.
We put the envelopes into the cash bag and put the bag in the aluminum box. Sonja went to the bathroom and brushed her hair and so on. She didn’t entirely shut the door and I sat there in the kitchen looking at the bathroom wall. When she came out she had on fresh lipstick, a pink that exactly matched her fingernails and the stripes on her shirt. We went out to the car. Sonja took the doll with her in the plastic bag. She locked it in the trunk.
We’re going to open a bunch of college savings accounts for you, said Sonja.
First we drove to Hoopdance and were ushered past the teller to talk with a bank manager in back. Sonja said that she was opening an account for me, a savings account, and we both signed printed cards while the woman typed out the passbook in my name with Sonja as a co-signer. Sonja handed over three of the envelopes, and the woman opening the account gave her a sharp look.
They sold his land, Sonja shrugged.
The woman counted out the money and typed it into the passbook. She put the passbook into a little plastic envelope and gave it pointedly to me.
I walked out with the passbook, and we drove to the other bank in Hoopdance, where we did the same thing. Only this time Sonja mentioned a big bingo win.
I’ll say, said the bank manager.
We kept going, drove to Argus. At one bank she said I had inherited money from my senile uncle. At another she mentioned a racehorse. Then she went back to the bingo win. It took all afternoon, us driving through the new grass pastures and crops just beginning to show. At a roadside rest stop, Sonja stopped and opened the trunk. She took out the doll in its plastic bags and dropped it in a trash can. After that, we stopped in the next town and got take-out hamburgers and french fries. Sonja wouldn’t let me drink a Coke but had some idea that orange soda was better for me. I didn’t care. I was so happy to be in a car where Sonja had to watch the road and I could glance at her breasts straining at those stripes before I looked up at her face. Every time I talked to her, I looked at her breasts. I kept the cash box on my lap and stopped thinking about the money, actually, as money. But at last when we had deposited it all and were driving toward home I went through each of the passbooks and added the numbers up in my head. I told Sonja there was over forty thousand dollars.
It was a full-size baby doll, she said.
How come we couldn’t keep out at least one bill? I asked. Once I thought about it, I was disappointed.
Okay, said Sonja. Here’s the thing. Wherever that money came from? They are gonna want it back. They will kill