The Striped Wallet

It was the summer of 2003 and my ten-year-old brother and I were in our grandmother’s new bright red Jeep Liberty driving down A1A from Fernandina Beach, on Amelia Island, where she lived to our uncle’s house in Flagler Beach. Every summer, our parents dropped us off in Florida to spend a few weeks of summer vacation with Grandma. We spent days at the beach and nights eating candy, playing cards while she smoked Virginia Slims, until eventually we’d jump up and dance around her living room to Patsy Cline. We visited my Uncle Andrew every summer, too, and Grandma always insisted on driving the scenic route along the beach and catching the ferry between the island and Jacksonville – a four or five-hour journey which would have been under two hours on I-95 but Grammy hated driving on the highway. You can’t smoke with the windows down on the highway. It didn’t matter, though, because she loved road trips and so did we. My brother, Mark, had been given his first-ever wallet that year, a green striped canvas material with velcro that he’d spent the last few months stuffing with frequent buyer cards for places like Subway and Cold Stone Creamery. At the behest of our mother, he had also written important phone numbers on a small card in his chicken scratch scrawl—the home phone numbers of neighbors, our grandmother, uncle, and his best friend. He’d also included a recent photo of himself at his karate belt ceremony. Our mother had given us each $80 in cash and Mark neatly tucked it into the wallet—he wouldn’t need it, Grandma was paying for everything—but it was for emergencies, just as the list of phone numbers were. We drove onto the ferry, parked, and took a seat at the bow for a good view of the journey. Seconds after sitting down, Mark, deciding he was parched, asked Grandma to buy him a Coke. She told him we had Diet Coke and iced tea in the car and handed him the keys to go get it. As he was walking back to the car he passed by an ice cream vending machine with some kids waiting in line. He knew this is what the emergency money was for and so he reached for his wallet to pull out the cash, but his wallet wasn’t in his pocket. He went back to the car and looked around on the backseat, but it was missing. He was frantic about losing it—the ice cream, Pokemon cards, and Gameboy games he could have spent that money on, gone. We figured he left it at her house on Amelia Island or dropped it on the beach. We flew home at the end of the summer without having found it. My grandmother died in 2017 and left her red Jeep Liberty—now 14-years-old but with fewer than 40k miles on it—to me. When I learned to drive years earlier, she had given me a car-key fob that said “Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.” I was living in Los Angeles and Mark was in DC, but we decided to fly to Amelia Island to pick up the car and drive it across the country together. We were both working part-time jobs that gave us the time off, but we soon realized how expensive a week-long journey across the country could be. A rainstorm held us up in Texas before a tire blew out in New Mexico, and we were running out of money. My bank account was completely empty, and Mark’s was dwindling fast. I had a credit card, but it was maxed out. We had at least another day of driving through the desert to make it back to LA. Finally getting anxious, we stopped at a gas station and desperately started digging around for any loose change or dollars Grandma might have left in the car before she died. I opened the trunk and, moving our luggage around, found a few quarters behind the seats. Suddenly, Patsy Cline started crooning “Walking After Midnight” through the speakers and I looked up to see Mark holding an old cassette box he’d found on the floorboards; he’d stuck the tape in the car’s player. He said, “Remember when we used to dance to this in Grandma’s living room? And we’d all collapse on the floor laughing from the dance moves and cramps in our sides from all the cake and ice cream?” I pulled the lever to collapse the backseat but it was stuck on something. I reached around the metal clasp and felt a soft object wedged in the mechanism. I yanked it out and saw it was a wallet—a green striped one—and asked Mark if it was his. While he stared, I opened it, found $80 inside, and let out a triumphant whoopee! I tossed it to him. He gasped and said it was his, but had to be from when he was a kid. We examined his childish handwriting and he hooted, brandishing a Subway rewards card that was one stamp short of a free foot-long. Looking up, we saw the familiar green and yellow glow of a Subway in the gas station convenience store just beyond the pumps. Suddenly, I felt weird, cold in the hot desert air. I called our mom. “I think Grandma is here with us,” I said, Patsy Cline still singing in the background. “She left us Mark’s elementary school wallet to find! It’s super creepy. The wallet has just enough money for gas to get home.” My brother shouted over Patsy, “It’s just a weird coincidence! I probably shoved it in there as a joke when I was a kid then forgot all about it.” But my mom, who has always believed in divine powers and fate, said, “You two were her favorite grandchildren, and those summers were the happiest of her life. It wasn’t a coincidence—it was a gift from her. She’s watching out for you both like she always has.” We lifted our heads to thank Grandma in the sky, filled up the tank, and sang along to Patsy all the way home.