Walk Home Together

Hundred dollar bills were a novelty he loved with a childlike glee. Almost like he couldn’t quite believe they were real, like it was really Monopoly money. Possibly this was a holdover from his childhood, where the money his Depression-born parents earned was stretched and saved and wrung out to its absolute limit. A hundred dollar bill was something Daddy Warbucks might have handed out, magnanimous and frivolous in the best way. 

Randomly slipping his kids or grandkids a “hundo” was one of his signature “I love you” moves…and when you thanked him, that voice would boom,

“Have a NICE day…”

Don’t get me wrong; it didn’t happen that often. But that was the charm. An unexpected gift that he gave for no reason at all. 

The last time I saw him he was sitting in his truck at The Torch on Wire Road. He met me there so I could pick up some football tickets to give to a friend of his in town. I had one of the boys with me. We talked just a minute and he gave me the tickets with a brand new bill on top. 

I don’t remember what he said. Probably “There you go, baby. Have a NICE day…”

He ruffled my son’s hair and drove away, down the exit to 85 south. 

**************

Months later, I was in Las Vegas, of all places, with a bunch of friends. If you were one of them, you remember this. 

We had just had beer and cheeseburgers at some place, laughing and cutting up and acting inappropriate as we do. It was a moment of lightness after what was, for some of us, a season of heartbreak and loss. We had spent much of that gray Alabama winter clinging to each other, in various stages of denial and sadness and confusion. We were just climbing out of it, and that trip was the catalyst. The sky was brilliantly blue, cloudless, when we had flown across the country, over the Grand Canyon and the Las Vegas Strip. When we landed we were starving. 

The waitress came to our table, as we were wiping away tears of laughter from something hilarious someone said. 

“Our credit card machine is down. You don’t happen to have cash, do you?” she asked.

I did. 

What better way to spend it? What would Mays have possibly loved more than to treat these amazing, resilient ladies to lunch in Vegas?  These women who had struggled and cried and laughed and talked for so many hours bringing each other, including his daughter, back to life?

I dug in my wallet and pulled out that last folded-up hundo and set it on the table. And gave a silent thanks to the beautiful souls sitting at the table with me, and the one whose presence I could feel grinning over my shoulder. It was a nice day.