Something big happened.
I found five dollars and discovered what it felt like to swallow the sky. The money was folded on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I saw its color first, a tight rectangle of green lying flat against the gray walk. It was sitting there like a gift, so I picked it up and handed it over to my mother who thanked me, hugged me, adored me.
“Honestly,” she said, “I didn’t know how we would eat tonight.”
To be taken by the hand to the corner store and allowed to choose a special candy—that’s something. To be talked of with gratitude and pleasure, my name coming out of her mouth like a song. To be lifted over the shoulder, made to feel like the sun and the moon—it was almost too much to bear.
But there was a twist. There’s always a twist.
Because when things are found, it is also true that they are lost, and the five dollars that made me family hero and benefactress of macaroni and cheese dinner was the very same bill dropped by someone else. So when my mother lifted me up to the counter, I smiled and let my fingers skim the ruffled faces of penny candy, but remembered the Brownie troop that had passed our place just minutes before my find.
I selected my candy reward and thought of the double-file line of brown-uniformed girls, giggling in their cocoa-colored berets, one of them not knowing she’d lost her money, one of them looking, digging perhaps, into her tiny brown pouch the exact moment the atomic fire-ball settled into my mouth.