Eleven Dollars in the Coffee Can

My father kept a coffee can on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the flour. It held the roof money. He was a bus mechanic, and every Friday he folded a few dollars into that can, because the roof leaked over my sister's bed and he meant to fix it right.

When I was seventeen I took eleven dollars out of it. I had heard of a game on the south side that I was sure I could read. I told myself I would have it back by Sunday, with extra, and nobody would ever know the can had been light.

I lost it in under an hour. Then I did what I would do for fifty more years. I borrowed from a friend to win it back, and lost that too.

My father counted the can every Sunday after church. I watched him from the hall. He lifted the lid, thumbed the bills, and put it back up behind the flour. He never said a word, and that silence was worse than any belt.

It went on for three weeks. By then I owed more than I could name, and I was lying to everyone I loved with a straight face.

One night he found me on the back steps. He sat down slow, the way a tired man does, and said, "I know it was eleven. I knew the first Sunday."

I couldn't speak. He said, "I'd rather you owed me than a stranger. I can forgive a can. I can't do much about the stranger."

Here is what I took too long to learn. A loss kept secret does not stay small. It grows in the dark, and it borrows against everyone around you. Eleven dollars is a bad night. Eleven dollars plus three weeks of lying is a habit with a head start.

I told him everything on those steps. It was the cheapest hour I ever spent, and I still gambled for decades afterward. But I never forgot that a man had held out his hand before I fell.

If you are hiding a number from someone who loves you, say it out loud. If there is nobody, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET.

Tell them while it is still eleven dollars.

Sal