“At least I’m man enough to keep that flour barrel full,” I says. “And if you do that again, you wont be eating out of it either.”
So the next time I told her that if she tried Dilsey again, Mother was going to fire Dilsey and send Ben to Jackson and take Quentin and go away. She looked at me for a while. There wasn’t any street light close and I couldn’t see her face much. But I could feel her looking at me. When we were little when she’d get mad and couldn’t do anything about it her upper lip would begin to jump. Everytime it jumped it would leave a little more of her teeth showing, and all the time she’d be as still as a post, not a muscle moving except her lip jerking higher and higher up her teeth. But she didn’t say anything. She just said,
“All right. How much?”
“Well, if one look through a hack window was worth a hundred,” I says. So after that she behaved pretty well, only one time she asked to see a statement of the bank account.
“I know they have Mother’s indorsement on them,” she says, “But I want to see the bank statement. I want to see myself where those checks go.”
“That’s in Mother’s private business,” I says. “If you think you have any right to pry into her private affairs I’ll tell her you believe those checks are being misappropriated and you want an audit because you dont trust her.”
She didn’t say anything or move. I could hear her whispering Damn you oh damn you oh damn you.
“Say it out,” I says, “I dont reckon it’s any secret what you and I think of one another. Maybe you want the money back,” I says.
“Listen, Jason,” she says, “Dont lie to me now. About her. I wont ask to see anything. If that isn’t enough, I’ll send more each month. Just promise that she’ll—that she—You can do that. Things for her. Be kind to her. Little things that I cant, they wont let. . . . But you wont. You never had a drop of warm blood in you. Listen,” she says, “If you’ll get Mother to let me have her back, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”
“You haven’t got a thousand dollars,” I says, “I know you’re lying now.”