“So, listen here, Patricia. Mr. Joe Salazar, the newspaper editor, leaves the letters for the advice column in my mailbox three times a week. I try to keep him to a schedule, but I’ve had no luck taming that man. I’m not real keen on people knowing I’m leaving town, so you keep this between me, you, and your cat, ya hear? Not even your nosy friend.”

“Oscar isn’t—” Okay, well maybe he is a little bit nosy. “Won’t the whole neighborhood see you driving out of town anyway?”

She tosses one single rain boot onto the pile in her back seat. I can’t help but wonder where the heck the other one is. “Not if I leave under the cover of darkness, they won’t.”

I wonder how she got to be this weird, or if she just always was and her husband’s death made things worse. “Okay, but what do you need from me?”

“Simple. Gather up my letters and send them to me at my sister’s house.” She stuffs a crumpled-up piece of scratch paper into the palm of my hand. “Share this address with no one.”

“Um . . . okay?”

“Then you check my mail every day, and when I send the letters back with my responses, I just want you to package ’em up all nice in the big envelopes I’ve left for you in my oven.”

“In your oven?” I can’t believe I’m hearing right.

“I hate repeating myself, Patricia. It’s a true waste of both our time. Leave the answered letters in the mailbox. Joe will come by and get them, and no one will be the wiser. When I get back, as long as you’ve done what I’ve asked you, I’ll compensate you for your time.”

“Compensate me for my time?”

“Again, here we go with the repeating. I. Will. Pay. You. Patricia,” she says nice and slow. I must still look pretty confused, because she adds, “With money! Ya know? The green stuff. What did you think I meant?”

I shrug. Sometimes when old people talk about money, they don’t get that things aren’t as cheap as they used to be. Like, I can’t do anything with a dime! Mr. Russo, the gas station clerk at Phillip’s Fill ’Em Up and Joseph “Digging for Gold” Russo’s dad, always lets me take a piece of change out of the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny jar at his register like it’s some kind of big deal. And I appreciate the thought, but what can I even buy with a penny? Dad says the penny is a drain on the economy and that we should just stop using them. So when Miss Flora Mae says she’s going to pay me, I’m not expecting a whole lot of anything.

Heck, when I fed Miss Dillon’s cat for a week when she went on a cruise, she told me she’d pay me too. She just didn’t say it would be in seashells she’d found on the beach and painted herself. When one of them started stinking up my room, Dad found a dead snail inside. Mom said it was a good lesson in doing nice things without expecting anything in return. I thought it was a good lesson in why you should check your seashells for living creatures before taking them home.