ELEVEN
COLTON BURPO, COLLECTION AGENT
After we got home from the hospital, we slept for a week. Okay, I’m
exaggerating—but not much. Sonja and I were completely drained. It was
like we had just been through a seventeen-day almost-car-crash. Our
wounds weren’t visible on the outside, but the soul-tearing worry and
tension had taken its toll.
One evening about a week after we got home, Sonja and I were
standing in the kitchen talking about money. She stood over a portable
table next to our microwave, sorting through the enormous stack of mail
that had accumulated during Colton’s hospital stay. Each time she opened
an envelope, she jotted down a number on a sheet of paper lying on the
counter. Even from where I stood leaning against the cabinets on the
opposite side of the kitchen, I could see that the column of figures was
getting awfully long.
Finally, she clicked the pen closed and laid it on the counter. “Do you
know how much money I need to pay the bills this week?”
As both the family and business bookkeeper, Sonja asked me that
question regularly. She worked part-time as a teacher so we had that
steady income, but it was a relatively small stream. My pastor’s salary was
also small, cobbled together from the tithes of a small but faithful
congregation. So the bulk of the earning came from our garage-door
business, and that income waxed and waned with the seasons. Every
couple of weeks, she presented me with the figures—not only on
household bills but on business payables. Now there were also several
massive hospital bills.
I performed a rough tally in my head and offered her a guess. “Probably
close to $23,000, right?”
“Yep,” she said, and sighed.
It might as well have been a million bucks. With me unable to work the
garage-door jobs because of my broken leg and then the hyperplasia, we
had already burned through our savings. Then, just when I was getting back