Devonne Brown

I left the windows on the car open when it got hot in the summer. Mom and Dad always did, so I figured I better too. The car was so hot a dog would have died if I’d have left it in there, a kid would have too, open windows or not. Our parents left us kids in the car for a minute or two when we were little, but they’d leave the thing running, like it mattered. I guess we were lucky nobody took off with us, never mind we didn’t die. Those were the days keys were left in the ignition and before air conditioning too. Nobody ever heard of kids dying in cars back then. Mom or Dad would run into a convenience store for cigarettes then get back in and light one up. Between the heat and the cigarette smoke, it was work to breathe. I got addicted to nicotine long before I started smoking. Those days would have resulted in a direct call to Child Protective Services, and Mom and Dad would have torn us new assholes if it did. They would have blamed us for the inconvenience and Lord, would we have been in trouble.

Today, my windows were cracked, and my kids were grown, gone, and safe as far as I could tell. I had more supplies for the cats and dog than I had groceries for me. Food was expensive, beans, potatoes, pasta, cabbage, and some canned goods would have to make me happy until I felt the need for ice cream. Ice cream had to be an occasion, a separate run, besides, I would have to take all the quarters out of the box by my bed to the bank to have them turned into dollars before anything extravagant like ice cream could be realized. I didn’t like using all quarters at the grocery store, it made me feel “less than.” That box, a hand made gift from long ago, wooden with wheat carved on the lid, came in handy for loose change. It held about fifty bucks in quarters and sundry pieces of silver, nickel, and copper. It was worth the trip to the change counter at the bank.

I stowed the groceries between the boots, the chair, and the beach umbrella in the “way back” of the van, and I opened the driver’s door to slide in. On the seat was a crisp hundred dollar bill. I got back out and shut the door, left the bill, rolled up all the windows, and locked the car. I looked in the cars around me. On the seats of some of the other cars were fives, twentys, hundreds, and ones. I wasn’t the only blessed recipient, but I was one of the better endowed. I’d only seen one other hundred. The ones and fives were insulting to say the least. I felt special whether I deserved it or not and grinned.

Then the doubt set in.

Was it real? If I spent it and it was fake, a shit storm of police and FBI would rain down on me and my house like it happened to my dad’s wife that time. One of her customers paid her with a fake “C-note” for a funeral wreath she’d made, it was as over as priced as it was tacky.  Purple and green netting with yellow and fuchsia plastic flowers flaunting the orange and red trailing bow of glitter and foil ever made and left a sparkling trail a mile long. She deserved to do hard time over that wreath, forget the forged dollars.That thing was ugliness delivered.

But with that money, she turned right around and went to the dollar store and bought more of the same stuff to make a replica of that horrible thing with the bad bill and got change back. Somebody wanted matching his and hers God awful wreaths. 

It wasn’t two hours before the real men in black, the FBI, as well as lots of blue lights with armed cops showed up at her house. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to get killed over a fake hundred like what happened in DC. I wanted one of those cashier’s pens with invisible ink that verified bills before I used my Benjamin.

Men in Black, no matter how adorable they might be, can’t come between me and my Rocky Road.