Chapter 5 - The Forty-Seven Dollar Room
By the fourth night after the eviction, the cold November rain was drumming relentlessly against the cracked window of Room 14 at the Starlight Budget Inn on Highway 17.
The wallpaper was peeling in damp yellow curls from the corner behind the television.
The small electric baseboard heater clicked and sputtered, smelling of scorched dust and old tobacco, barely taking the edge off the swamp chill creeping through the door frame.
I sat on the edge of the saggy double bed, wrapped in my winter coat, counting the crumpled paper bills laid out across the faded polyester bedspread.
Two twenties.
One five.
Two singles.
Forty-seven dollars.
That was the sum total of thirty-eight years of faithfulness, silence, and sacrifice.
Quinton’s prepaid debit card had arrived in the mail that morning, but when I attempted to use it at the grocery store down the road to buy bread and tea, the register screen flashed FUNDS NOT CLEARED PENDING LEGAL RELEASE.
He had conditioned the twelve hundred dollars on my signature surrendering all spousal support claims.
My hands shook as I reached for the dented blue tin box sitting on the stained nightstand.
The box had once held Scottish shortbread cookies my father had brought home from the docks when I was seven years old.
Twelve years ago, three days before Daddy passed away in the Wilmington Island hospice, he had pressed that tin into my hands.
"Rosie," Daddy had whispered, his breathing shallow and rattling beneath the oxygen cannula. "Keep this hidden under your cedar chest. Don't let Quinton see it. Don't open it unless you have nowhere left to turn."
I had tucked it away, believing it contained old family photographs or my mother's silver thimble.
Now, sitting in the freezing motel room with forty-seven dollars in my pocket, I pulled open the latch.
Inside lay the sealed cream envelope addressed in Daddy's firm, nautical handwriting:
For Rosalie Bellamy. Personal & Confidential. Deliver by Hand to Arthur Vance, First Sentinel Bank, Atlanta.
Beside the envelope sat a hundred-dollar bill from 1996, wrapped around a round brass token bearing the seal of the Savannah River Pilot Association.
May you like
I looked at the hundred-dollar bill, then at the highway outside where the tractor-trailers roared past in the blinding rain.
I stood up, packed my single cardboard suitcase, walked out to the motel office, and paid the night clerk thirty dollars for a taxi to the downtown Greyhound terminal.
