One Plate of Eggs and Toast: The Breakfast That Took Twenty Years to Repay

Chapter 3

The Napkin in the Library Book

Willa kept the napkin in her library book.

It was a copy of A Wrinkle in Time, checked out from the Willow Bend public library and renewed so many times the librarian had finally just told her to keep it. The librarian had pushed the book across the desk one rainy afternoon and said, "Willa, honey, that book is more yours than the library's now." Willa had carried it home inside her coat to keep it dry.

She had read it four times. Her favorite was Meg Murry — angry and stubborn and too much, a girl who didn't fit and went anyway. On cold nights Willa would read the tesseract chapters with a flashlight and imagine folding the distance between Chestnut Street and wherever her mother had gone, between eighty-seven cents and two-fifty.

The napkin lived between pages 112 and 113, folded in quarters, the ketchup sun faded to a rust-colored ghost. Some nights Willa took it out and unfolded it on her pillow and looked at it until her eyes blurred, and then she folded it back up, exactly in quarters, and put it away. It was the most valuable thing she owned. It was the only valuable thing she owned.

She had developed a ritual for it. She would wait until Bea's bedroom door clicked shut, then unfold the napkin on the pillowcase and trace the sun with her fingertip — the circle first, then each wobbly ray, counting them the way she'd counted her coins. The paper was thinning along the fold lines, going soft as cloth.

The house on Chestnut Street was small and leaned slightly to the left, the way old houses do when they've decided to rest. Willa's grandmother Bea kept it clean with a ferocity that suggested she was holding the walls up by willpower. Bea was sixty-nine, with hands ruined by thirty years of laundromat steam, and a cough that had started as a winter thing and stayed for the spring. She worked the early shift, came home smelling of detergent and hot metal, and counted tips at the kitchen table with the concentration of a bank examiner.

The tip-counting had its own ritual too. Bea would empty her apron pocket onto the oilcloth — coins first, then the folded bills — and sort them into stacks while the potatoes fried. Willa did her homework at the other end of the table, and the two of them worked in companionable silence, the grease popping in the pan.

Willa's mother, Carla, had left when Willa was four. There was a photograph on the mantel — Carla at nineteen, laughing, holding a baby Willa who was screaming — and there were no letters, no calls, no explanations. Bea never spoke ill of her daughter. That was the rule of the house, unspoken but iron: we do not spend our words on people who aren't here. Willa had questions stacked inside her like dishes, and she had learned to keep them stacked.

Some evenings, when Bea was in the kitchen, Willa would stand in front of the mantel and study the photograph. She had Carla's mouth, she decided — the same wide laughing mouth. She wondered what the laugh had sounded like. She wondered these things and stacked them with the other dishes, and never asked Bea.

"How was school?" Bea asked that evening, setting down a plate of fried potatoes. The potatoes were the third night in a row. Neither of them mentioned it.

"Good. Miss Fenn says my bridge might win at the science fair."

"Your bridge." Bea smiled, and the smile took ten years off her face. "My granddaughter, the engineer."

At school that day, a boy from the back row had asked Willa at lunch what she'd had for breakfast. "Oatmeal," Willa had said, which was true most days, and the boy had lost interest, and Willa had felt the small, practiced triumph of a secret kept. Only Miss Fenn ever looked at her a half-second longer than the answer required, the way teachers do when they know.

Willa didn't tell Bea about the diner. She didn't tell her about the eighty-seven cents or Danny or the plate being taken away. She didn't tell her about Alma Torres or the ketchup sun. Some things were too big to fit in the small house on Chestnut Street, and some things — she understood this without being able to say it — belonged to Willa alone. The napkin was hers. The promise she had made under the bell was hers. I'll pay you back.

She took the long way home from school now, down Main Street past the Copper Kettle, and she always slowed at the corner of Main and Ferry. Through the glowing windows she could sometimes see the woman in the white apron at the grill. Willa never went in. She would stand across the street with her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers finding the folded napkin through the lining, and then she would walk on.

That night, lying in the bed she had slept in her whole life, listening to Bea cough in the next room and then force herself quiet so Willa could sleep, Willa made a second promise, silently, to the ceiling. She would get big. She would get strong. She would learn how money worked, how buildings worked, how the whole tilted world worked. And someday she would be the one holding the plate.

She made it specific, the way Miss Fenn said you should make plans specific or they weren't plans at all. She would ask the librarian for books about buildings — real books, with diagrams. She would keep saving found money in the teacup until the numbers stopped being a wall and started being a door. Someday she would walk into the Copper Kettle with more than enough, and pay for the girl at the next stool who was counting coins in her fist.

She fell asleep with her hand under her pillow, where the library book was.

In the morning, the book was on the nightstand, squared neatly with the edge, and her blanket was tucked in around her shoulders. Bea never mentioned the book. Bea never mentioned the napkin, which she must have known about. Some things belonged to Willa alone, and Bea, who understood more than she said, let them.