When a couple walked out without paying for their dinner, I stood in the middle of the restaurant and cried, because I didn’t have the money to cover it. What I didn’t know yet was that it would turn out to be the luckiest four hundred dollars I ever spent.
Let me tell you what four hundred dollars was to me, so you understand.
It was two weeks of groceries in my house. It was the electric bill, with enough left over to put a little toward next semester’s tuition. It was the difference between calling home and saying everything’s fine and calling home and lying about it.
It was not dinner. At least, not to people like me.
I had moved a state away for college. Close enough to visit home when I could scrape together the gas money, far enough that every emergency felt like the end of the world because I couldn’t just drive over and fix it. For almost a year I’d been waitressing at a place called Bellamy’s, a nice restaurant near campus, the kind where the prices made me flinch even after seeing them a thousand times. I worked evening shifts around my classes, and I sent home whatever I could spare.
My mother and I had always been close, even though she wasn’t the type to say it out loud. Affection didn’t come naturally to Evelyn. She was stern and orderly and proper about everything. She planned her appointments weeks ahead. She kept every receipt in a labeled folder in a specific drawer. She called me at exactly eight o’clock every Sunday evening, never a minute past. Even her kitchen towels had assigned spots, and God help you if you hung the dish towel where the hand towel went.
I used to find it exhausting. Now I’d give anything to hear her scold me about a towel.
A woman who planned her life down to the towels does not walk out the front door with nothing and disappear. Everyone said the same thing. The neighbors, her coworkers, my aunt. That is the last thing Evelyn would ever do.
I’d come home when it happened and spent days at the police station, and days after that calling them, and days after that just sitting by the phone. They were kind enough, but they didn’t have much. She was an adult. There was no sign of a struggle in the house. No blood, no broken door, nothing forced. Every lead they mentioned seemed to dissolve before it went anywhere. An adult woman with no evidence of foul play, in a system with too many cases and not enough people, becomes a folder that sits in a drawer.
We looked into hiring a private detective. He was polite on the phone and told me honestly what it would cost, and it was a number that made two weeks of groceries look like pocket change. We didn’t have it. My aunt offered what she could, which wasn’t much, and I told her to keep it for herself.
