A Simple Plan by Scott Smith Page B

the table. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything.
    I stood in front of her, holding the empty bag. “It’s real,” I said.
    She continued to stare at it. She looked pained, as if she’d just been struck in the chest.
    “It’s all right,” I said. I stooped down, like I was going to start putting the money back, but instead I just touched it with my hand. The bills felt cool against my fingertips, their paper soft and worn, like cloth. They were old, their edges a little tattered, and I thought of all the hands they must’ve passed through already before reaching my own—millions of different people, in and out of wallets and purses and vaults, so that they could end up here, finally, spread out in a pile across my living-room floor.
    “You took it from the feedstore?” she asked.
    “No. I found it.”
    “But it’s somebody’s. They have to be looking for it.”
    I shook my head. “Nobody’s looking for it.”
    She didn’t seem to hear me. “It’s four million dollars?”
    “Four point four.”
    “You found it with Jacob?”
    I nodded, and she frowned.
    “Where?”
    I told her about the fox and Mary Beth, about the hike into the park and our discovery of the plane. When I told her about the bird, she squinted at my forehead, a pained, sympathetic look coming over her face, but she didn’t say anything.
    After I finished, we sat for a bit in silence. I picked up a packet and held it out toward her. I wanted her to touch it, to see what it felt like, a dense little brick of money, but she wouldn’t take it.
    “You want to keep it, don’t you?” she asked.
    I shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.”
    She didn’t say anything. She put her hands on her stomach and stared down at it, a distracted look on her face. The baby was kicking.
    “If we keep it,” I said, “we’ll never have to worry about money again.”
    “We don’t have to worry about money now, Hank. You’ve got a good job. We don’t need this.”
    I stared into the fire, thinking about that. It was dying down, the flames flickering low. I got up and added another log.
    She was right, of course: we couldn’t claim—as Jacob and Lou probably did, and as my parents might’ve had they lived long enough to join us in our present situation—that the money was something we needed, something we couldn’t live without. Our life wasn’t a struggle in that way. We were solidly middle class; when we worried about the future, it was not about how we were going to feed ourselves, or pay our bills, or educate our children, it was about how we’d manage to save enough for a larger house, a better car, more complicated appliances. But just because we didn’t need the money didn’t mean we couldn’t want it, couldn’t see it as a salvation of a different sort, and put up some struggle to keep it.
    I’d gone to college to become a lawyer, only to give it up when I hadn’t gotten the grades. Now I was an accountant in the feedstore of my hometown, the same town I’d spent all my childhood vowing to escape. I’d settled for something less than I’d planned on when I was younger and then convinced myself that it was enough. It wasn’t, though; I saw that now. There were boundaries on Sarah’s and my life, limits to what we could do and where we could go, and the pile of money lying at my feet illuminated them, highlighted the triviality of our aspirations, the bleakness of our dreams. It offered us a chance at something more.
    I tried to find a way to communicate this to Sarah.
    “My job’s never going to amount to much,” I said, pushing at the fire with the poker. “I’ll be manager someday, after Tom Butler dies or retires, but he’s not much older than me, so neither of those’ll happen very soon, and by the time they do, I’ll be an old man myself.”
    I’d thought this several times over the previous few years, a gray, depressing probe into the future, but I’d never spoken it out