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Bathsheba Monk's
Short Story Contest
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One of the
“Best Books of 2006”
The Chicago Tribune.
Now You See It...
Sarah Crichton Books FSG
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Bathsheba Monk Short Story
Contest
I would like to thank everyone who entered the first Bathsheba Monk Short Story Contest—there were entries from all over the world and every point of view—and I am pleased to announce that Chuck Belanger’s story, “Finders-Keepers” is the winner.
“Finders-Keepers” is a particularly well-crafted story with characters you recognize but still find surprising. Aren’t they the best kind? See for yourself.
FINDERS-KEEPERS
By Chuck Belanger
Angela was nine years old, so one hundred dollars seemed to her a lot of money, like a fortune. The thought that the money might be hers surged little bubbles of awe inside her. She felt bad for whoever lost it, and tried to imagine who it might be, what they looked like.
‘Finders-keepers’ was a rule from as early as she could remember. At home she’d learned it from older brothers and sisters, on the playground from the other kids. The lesson was constant, relentless, and ruthless--coins or wrapped candies dropped on the ground, claimed by lucky finders who got to become keepers.
Philip Mayer, from next door, once found a wallet on Main Street when the kids were walking to the 4th of July Parade. The thick brown billfold had been half under a wheeled dumpster at an alley entrance where it caught his eye. There was no chance of finding the owner in the crowds surging along the sidewalk. In the wallet Phillip found a five dollar bill and ten singles, credit cards, a driver’s license from Iowa, paper scraps with names and phone numbers on them.
“Finders-keepers,” he’d announced, taking the bills from the wallet, then dropping it in the mailbox at Leavitt.
Her brother Gabe approved of the transaction, saying the owner would be happy to get the wallet back, would have gladly paid fifteen dollars in reward. Philip bought slurpees for all of them at the 7-11 after the parade.
The episode confused her. Her brother was probably right. He and Philip were fourteen and understood things she did not. And ‘finders-keepers’ was as ironclad a rule as she knew. But the slurpee still felt stolen.
In all her live-long life, she had never been the finder, the keeper.
Try as she might, she could not picture the person who lost the envelope. She was with her dad at the Secretary of State’s office on a Saturday morning. Long lines snaked back and forth over the linoleum floor in a large, brightly-lit room.
Standing in the line was awful. It seemed like it never moved. And she had to go to the bathroom. When she sat on the floor so she wouldn’t pee in her tights, clutching her puffy winter coat to her chest, her dad told her to go sit at a row of plastic chairs along the wall, out of the way, where people wouldn’t trip over her.
She protested, but he was talking crossly, anxious about something. She went to the chairs and sat, swinging her feet back and forth under the seat, thinking about jump rope jingles.
There were rows of blue plastic chairs in front of her filling the center of the room. Almost no one was sitting down. One old grandma nodded in and out of sleep five seats away along the wall she sat at, but all the rows in front of her were empty. Then she saw the white envelope under a seat in the row right in front of her. No one was near it. She looked at it for a while, sure whoever dropped it would notice and be back any minute.
Then she got curious. Angela slid off her chair, put her coat on it to hold her place, and went down the row. There was no one in any of the rows of chairs. She stooped and reached under the chair to slide the envelope to her. She picked it up and looked around again. It was like an adventure.
Nobody paid any attention to her. People stood in the lines behind the tapes with the dull, faraway looks on their faces that grown-ups got when they were doing something that they had to do. Like standing in checkout lines, or waiting for a bus. She dawdled back to her seat, put her coat on her lap, and swung her feet some more, humming to herself.
Later, she didn’t know how long, her father came to where she sat. She didn’t notice him till she saw his tan work boots on the floor in front of where she was staring, trying to do times tables in her head. She looked up happily. He’d said they would go to MacDonald’s if she was good and she’d been good.
“Still need to go to the bathroom?” She had forgotten, but the reminder brought back the pressure. She nodded, the need suddenly urgent again.
“Okay, it’s over there.” He pointed at the blue sign in the corner with the woman figure outlined in white. “Give me your coat. What’s that?” He pointed at the envelope in her hand. She’d forgotten she was holding it.
“It was on the floor, over there.” She pointed down the aisle of plastic chairs. “I found it.” He nodded and held his hand out for it.
“Go do your business,” he said, and she hurried off toward the sign, worrying she would not be able to hold it in, hoping there would not be a line.
Sam watched Angela hurry off to the restroom. This was hard for her, having to wait around like that. She was a good kid. He looked at the envelope and bowed it open, expecting to find a State form of some kind. There was money in it. He raised his head to look around. Nobody was looking in his direction.
He fingered the bills. Five twenties. Nice little windfall. Could always use a hundred bucks. He looked at the front and back of the envelope. Nothing. Just a plain letter envelope like you’d buy in a box of twenty-five at Osco.
Angela come bouncing happily out of the restroom. If it had been his envelope, if he’d carefully placed five new twenty dollar bills into it, it would have been for something important. Losing it would be a big problem. Angela came skipping up to him, and he remembered MacDonald’s.
“Did you look in the envelope?” She shook her head. He opened the flap to show her the contents. Her eyes widened.
“Wow,” she said softly. “How much is there?” She could see the number twenty on the corner of a bill. Twenty dollars was a lot of money. And she could see there was more in there.
“A hundred dollars,” Sam told her solemnly. “You’re sure there was no one sitting near there?” She nodded just as solemnly back, and he knew she was telling the truth.
Now what? Keep it? Split it with her? Teach her that sometimes luck ran your way for a change? Every once in a while?
She was looking up at him, eyes still wide, waiting to find out what someone was supposed to do when something like this happened. This was one of those times when you would do one thing as just a person; and another thing entirely as a parent. Sam sighed. It was a price you paid for having kids. She’d learn the hard things later. Nine year olds weren’t completely innocent, but innocent enough.
“We’ll turn it in,” he told her. “Maybe there’ll be a reward. Or if no one claims it, maybe we can keep it.” Angela nodded, thrilled. Finders-keepers had not occurred to her till now. But if someone lost a hundred dollars, they probably needed it.
Still holding her coat in his arm, Sam took Angela’s hand to lead her to a counter with a green “Information” sign hanging over it.
Helen watched the man and little girl approach the counter. She hated Saturday hours, hated the petty impatience of people who could not conduct business during the week. Everyone on Saturdays had a problem or was in a godawful hurry.
She was stuck with Saturday hours because of the ‘Xmas cards’.
It was crap, the money she had to pass to her supervisor four times a year. Your ‘Xmas card’ it was called. She knew the rules. And it wasn’t that much money, really. Two hundred dollars a year wasn’t all that much considering her job paid $48,500, more than she could earn ‘outside’. But in the last year, something in her had started to balk. And the price for balking was working Saturdays, for being late with her Xmas cards.
The guy in the black jacket seemed like every other Saturday morning schlub she dealt with. The pudgy girl with him looked about ten, around the age where some girls started to soften towards womanly contours, the age where it was hard to tell if it was that, or the kid was just pudgy. You could tell pudgy when they were eight, or thirteen; but in between, it was hard to tell.
“My daughter found this on the floor, under a chair.” The guy slid a plain white envelope across the counter at her. She briskly opened it and pulled the bills out. They were crisp and new, sharp edged, with a surface that felt like sandpaper. The kid was watching her with big brown eyes opened wide. The serial numbers were not sequential. She put her tongue between thumb and forefinger to count.
“One hundred dollars,” she said, inspecting the envelope front and back. The kid was looking at her like she was watching the priest in Church or something.
No marks on the envelope. The little kid had struck it rich. “We’ll hold it two weeks. If no one claims it, come back.” The guy’s eyes lit up. She figured it was somebody’s payoff for a truck license or something, but there was no way to tell.
A spurt of elation surged in Sam’s chest. Not bad. Who could prove they owned cash in an unmarked envelope? He’d split it with Angela. Fifty bucks was more money than she’d ever seen at once. Fifty bucks wasn’t a lottery ticket, but what the hell? It was a new spinning rod. A good one. The double chinned woman with glasses hanging around her neck on a silver chain pushed the envelope back across the counter with a ball point pen laid across it.
“Name, phone number,” she said, all business. Sam took up the pen.
“Two weeks?”. Helen nodded, holding the bills. The guy printed his name and a phone number in careful block letters and slid it with the pen back to her. She briskly wrote a dollar sign, a one, and two zeroes in the upper left of the envelope, where a return address would go, wrote the date below it, and put the bills back in the envelope. She’d better put this in her purse. If she left it in the drawer, it would disappear.
The guy handed his daughter her puffy coat and turned for the exit, the little girl bouncing along next to him, pestering him with excitement and questions.
They were barely out the door when the vulture appeared. A heavy, sad-faced woman with long stringy hair, eyes glittering, from drugs, or nerves, or both.
“Anyone turn in an envelope? A white one? With cash in it?” she asked. Helen regarded her dully. If you were going to pull a hustle, at least learn how to do it right.
“How much cash?”
“Uh, fifty dollars. Tens,” the woman said, licking her lips. “It’s from my welfare check.” She was good, must have spotted the transaction from somewhere in the room and saw an opportunity, even spotted how many bills in the envelope. She just guessed the denomination wrong. Helen looked straight into her eyes.
“No,” she said coldly.
For a week, Angela thought about the money every day. One hundred dollars. She was afraid to tell anyone about it. She could not imagine what to do with a hundred dollars. She could take the whole family out to dinner--everyone dressed up in a restaurant with white table cloths and ordering whatever they wanted and when the waitress brought the check she, the youngest, would count out those bills to pay and the waitress would bring the change to her on one of those cute little black plastic trays. Or she could go to the American Girl store: she could get one of those dolls she’d seen when Aunt Helen took her last Summer. And an extra outfit, too. And she could put some of the money into the box at church to-help-those-less-fortunate. It was hard to imagine that much money.
By the second week, she had forgotten about it. Katie Leone was snubbing her and she did not know why.
Sam was at Home Depot Saturday morning, buying a sink for the basement bathroom, when he remembered the money. How could he have forgotten? He looked at his watch while the acne scarred girl counted change into his palm. Ten thirty. Plenty of time. Someone would have had to written down the serial numbers to prove a claim for cash in an unmarked envelope….
Helen had not forgotten about the money. The envelope was in her purse, and every time she opened it the last two weeks, she was reminded. After the one vulture, no one else had approached anyone in the office about missing cash. She was sure now it must have been for a payoff. Someone got careless. Or maybe something had happened to whoever lost it. Whatever. She still owed Mr. Powell her ‘Xmas card’, and had been getting increasingly surly hints about it for the past week.
When she’d taken her station at the counter this morning, she’d pulled the now slightly dog-eared envelope from her purse. She took two tens from her wallet and exchanged them for one of the twenties. Then she’d put the envelope in the drawer and waited for the schlub to show up.
By eleven, she was wondering if he was gonna show. He would. That kind of schlub wouldn’t let a hundred dollars go, unless something had happened to him. Shortly after eleven, she saw him threading his way around the shuffling line of people waiting to do business with the State. Same black ski jacket, a smear of white dust on the right sleeve. Must have been doing a project around the house when he remembered.
Sam loped across the room to the information counter, trying to contain himself. Driving over, he decided that Angela’s cut would be twenty-five dollars. That was plenty for a nine year old. When he’d walked across the parking lot, dodging cars creeping through driver’s exams, he’d had a sudden fear that someone else would be stationed at the counter. Someone who would deny any knowledge of any envelope. Then what would he do? His heart rose again in relief when he saw the heavy jowled old broad at the counter.
“I’ve come about the unclaimed money…two weeks ago?” He had another sudden fear--that someone had claimed it. The woman looked at him coldly.
“Name?” she said. He told her. She made a small show of riffling through a drawer, then pulled an envelope from it. It looked a little worn, smudged, but he recognized his printing on the front.
The woman pulled the bills from the envelope and he saw at once there were more than five in her hand. She counted out two of the twenties, placed a ten dollar bill atop them, and pushed fifty dollars at him.
“Unclaimed assets found on State property, State keeps half,” she said, looking straight at him. This guy wouldn’t squawk. She knew her schlubs.
Sam wasn’t listening, was jolted. Her words hadn’t quite reached his ears as the pile of bills in front of him registered in his brain.
“Huh?”
“Unclaimed assets found on State property, State keeps half,” she repeated. “Fifty-fifty split. State policy.” She looked at him placidly. He looked up at her, then down at the money, then back at her.
“Uh, okay. Do you need me to sign anything?” She pushed the envelope at him.
“Sign the front of the envelope and date it,” she said. A nice touch if she did say so herself. He scribbled his signature, scooped up the bills, and turned to leave. Then he halted, and turned back to her. Uh oh.
“Thank you,” he said, then turned and left.
Helen watched him till he had pushed out the door to the parking lot. Then she pulled a letter envelope from her drawer with ‘Secretary of State’ printed on the upper left corner. She put the remaining money into the envelope, dragged the flap across her tongue, careful not to give herself a paper cut, then pressed the envelope flat on the counter with the side of her hand, and turned it over.
‘Merry Xmas’ she wrote on the front, and signed her name below. She carefully tore the envelope the schlub had signed into eight pieces, dropped the scraps into the waste basket at her right shin, and turned to walk over and placed the envelope into Powell’s mail slot.
Sam knew he’d been had as he pushed out the door to the parking lot. It ticked him off, being held up for fifty bucks like that by the old witch. It was chickenshit. She had chicken-shitted him. But he’d done a quick calculation in that first stunned moment when she’d pushed only half the money at him. Take her on for fifty bucks? Maybe take on the whole state bureaucracy? They might end up keeping the whole thing if he made a stink. Or make him wait for months while they did some kind of ‘investigation’ in which he could prove nothing. Fuck it. Fifty bucks was fifty bucks.
But what was he going to tell Angela?
Angela was eating a cheese sandwich at the kitchen table when her dad came in the back door. She was taking little half moon bites out of a half to see if she could eat it in exactly ten same sized bites. A little dribble of mayonnaise leaked out from under the white bread where she’d just bitten. She looked up at her father as he thumped the back door shut with his butt like he always did.
“Bad news, honey,” he said.
“What?” she said, wondering.
“About your money.” Her heart sank a little. She’d forgotten about the money. Her hundred dollars. Her dad stepped next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him. He looked serious, maybe even a little sad.
“Somebody claimed it,” he said. “Sorry.”
Angela felt a drop of disappointment in her stomach. It felt like when her goldfish Petey died. Her eyes got wet, but she clenched her lips a little. It was okay. The money had never really been hers anyway.
© Chuck Belanger
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