Part Three: The Fair

For the past two weeks, all Morgan talked about was the fall fair at Whitman Elementary.

It was an annual thing, held on the Friday before Halloween in the school gym. The PTA ran it to raise money for field trips. There were carnival games and a bounce house in the corner, a cakewalk, face painting, a raffle, and a lunch of pizza from the place on Sixth Avenue. And, most importantly, according to my son, the giant cookies.

“There’s pizza, games, prizes, and giant cookies, Mom,” he told me at dinner on a Wednesday. “Real giant cookies. As big as your face.”

“Sounds like a very serious educational event,” I said.

“Extremely educational,” Morgan said. “There’s a math game where you guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. That’s estimation.”

He talked about it every night. Which games had the best prizes. Whether he should do the cakewalk or the duck pond first. Whether the giant cookies would be chocolate chip or M&M this year. His friend Jaylen said M&M. His friend Aiden said chocolate chip. It was the subject of intense debate in the fifth-grade cafeteria.

Whitman is a Title I school, which means most of the families there don’t have much money. Mine included. Seventy-eight percent of the kids get free or reduced lunch. The fair was cheap, a dollar a ticket, most games one or two tickets, the pizza two dollars a slice, the cookies three. But even a cheap fair costs money, and I knew some kids would go with nothing.

I tried not to think about it too much. I couldn’t fix it. I could only take care of my own.

Part Four: Fifty Dollars

The evening before the fair, I found Morgan on his bedroom floor counting his savings.

He kept it in a coffee can with a Seattle Sounders sticker on the lid. Birthday money from my sister, a few dollars from returning soda cans, a five-dollar bill he found in a parking lot and was still a little guilty about. He’d spread it all out on the carpet in neat little stacks.

Twelve dollars and forty cents.

He looked up when I came in. “I’ve got twelve,” he said. “That’s twelve tickets. Or four cookies. Or two cookies and six tickets. Or…” He frowned, doing math. “Pizza’s two dollars.”

I’d had a good month. Lots of overtime at the dispatch center during a windstorm that knocked out power across half the county. I’d paid the rent and the car insurance and put a little away, and I had a fifty-dollar bill in my wallet I’d been holding on to for no reason in particular.

I sat down on the floor beside him. I took out my wallet. I handed him the fifty.

His eyes got big.

“No way,” he said.

“It’s yours,” I said.

“All fifty?” he said. He held it by the corners like it might break.

“All fifty,” I said. “Buy what makes you happy.”

He looked at the bill. Then he looked at me. His face was suddenly very serious, the same serious face he had on the edge of the stage when he was four.

“What if I spend it on something dumb?” he asked.

“Then you learn a fifty-dollar lesson,” I said.

He thought about that. Then he grinned.

“You’re my favorite mom,” he said.

“I’m your only mom,” I said.

“Still counts,” he said.

The next morning, he put the bill carefully inside the zipper pocket of his backpack, folded in half, with his twelve dollars and forty cents wrapped around it with a rubber band. He checked it twice before we left the apartment. He checked it again in the car.

When I pulled up to the drop-off line at Whitman, he unbuckled his seat belt and grabbed his backpack. The coast was not clear. Jaylen was standing right by the front doors. So I got a fist bump.

“Don’t spend it all on cookies!” I said as he climbed out.

He turned around on the sidewalk and grinned at me through the open door.

“No promises!” he said.

He ran toward the school with his backpack bouncing. Jaylen yelled something, and Morgan yelled something back, and they disappeared through the front doors together.

I drove to work. I worked my shift. A car accident on I-5. A grandmother who’d fallen and couldn’t get up. A teenager who’d called because his little brother had swallowed a battery. The money slipped from my mind completely.

Until 2:18 that afternoon.