I’m so broke. I’m so broke. I needed the money to get through the semester. To buy my textbook. I’d scraped all I could and then some, and this was my only bit of money left. But it was the hundred dollars Uncle Avery had given me when I was six. And he was dead.

       When I was a kid and he’d given it to me, I’d promised I’d never, ever spend it. I’d told him so, and he’d jokingly said I’d last maybe a week with that promise. I’d stuck out my baby chin and insisted I would keep it forever and ever, and since then, I had. Once I’d almost broken it to get money for the new baby doll when I was eight. I’d gone without it, then gotten it for my birthday ten months later when they’d gone on sale and I hadn’t wanted one anymore. Once I’d almost used it to pay the fee for a class trip when I was twelve and our family didn’t have the extra money. I’d had to stay behind, and it turned out almost everyone on the trip got food poisoning from bad eggs at the hotel breakfast bar. And when I was sixteen, I’d come very close to breaking my promise and buying my boyfriend the expensive motorcycle helmet he’d wanted. I’d made him a card instead, and later felt relieved that I hadn’t spent my money when he’d broken up with me a month later. But now . . . was I finally going to break my promise?

       I held the hundred-dollar bill and saw Uncle Avery’s face superimposed over Ben Franklin’s. It wasn’t all I had left of him; he’d left me a bunch of his favorite books and trinkets in his will, stuff I’d loved to look at and play with when our family visited him in our occasional trips to Florida. I felt disgusted with myself for considering spending it; what was next, would I pawn his gifts for tuition next semester? I shouldn’t even consider it, I should frame it and keep my promise. If he was up in Heaven, he would see me spend it and shake his head, telling his angel buddies he’d known it wouldn’t be long. But still . . . was there anything really that wrong with living up to his expectations, even if they were negative?

       I decided to think on it, and put the hundred-dollar bill under my pillow. I usually kept it in my photo album, in a dusty out-of-the-way closet, so that I would not be tempted to take it out. But just like setting a clock to be fast was ineffective if I knew it was fast, I never forgot it was there. Sometimes it burned a hole in my pocket without ever going near my jeans; I considered it a last resort, thinking if I absolutely must, I still have Uncle Avery’s hundred dollars. But when it came to the last resort, I felt like I couldn’t do it.

       I could borrow the library copies of the textbook for this semester. It might be out at inconvenient times, but I could try to do the assignments and reading ahead of time and just deal with it. I didn’t need to buy it, and if it came down to it, I could borrow a textbook from a classmate or something. Maybe some bank would grant me another loan, but probably not until enough of my last one was paid off. I pondered alternatives as I got into bed. It was kind of stupid to think I needed to spend this money; after all, if I was this close to spending it now, it indicated a problem. A hundred dollars wasn’t that much money. If I was so low on money now that I needed a fifteen-year-old gift to pull me through, it would happen again. I needed an alternate income. And there was no reason I shouldn’t start looking for it now.

       I dreamed of Uncle Avery. It was a strange dream, because it was set in a time that had already happened, when I was visiting his cabin when I was nine. My parents had gone canoeing and left me to work on his garden with him, and I was weeding while he was applying some kind of fertilizer to the soil. But even though this was a scene from my memory, I already knew he was dead, and I knew I wasn’t really nine years old. It was like I was playing a role in the dream.

       We finished preparing the soil for planting, and Uncle Avery pulled out his seed packets. He cursed when he saw how many seeds were in the sunflower package, and I asked him what was wrong.

       “I don’t really have room for all these, but I have to plant them all,” he said.

       “Why?” I asked. “Don’t they keep? Can’t you wait ’til next year for some of them?”

       “Of course I could,” he said, “but I don’t want to. I don’t like the thought of them sitting in that unnatural package, waiting to be put into their rightful home. A seed unplanted is worse than a dead flower, because it never had a chance to bloom.” He shuddered visibly, and looked at me. “And who knows? I might not be around next year to plant the rest of them.”

       He opened his arms hugged me when he saw how that upset me. Because my rational, non-dreaming mind knew that that had been the last spring he’d experienced. He’d lived for the day, for the moment, since he’d found out he had the HIV virus. His had been a swift case, moving quickly into full-blown AIDS, and he always said one never knew when a disease would attack him and bring him down. That was one of the amazing things about him, he could be realistic without being depressed about it, and he’d been one of the most alive people I’d ever known, until the week before he’d died. So, I understood his desire to get those seeds in the ground. He wanted to see them bloom.

       The rest of my dream involved us clearing another patch of land for planting the sunflowers, and I woke up with tears on my cheeks. He’d now been dead for about ten years, and I could still go to his garden in my dreams as vividly as a decade ago.

       I took the hundred dollar bill out from under my pillow, and looked at it. I knew what I had to do. I had to buy a frame.

       At the store, I quickly chose the gold gilded one, with little lion’s heads in the corners, since Uncle Avery had liked wild cats. I wanted the frame to preserve his memory as well as its contents. When I got home, I dug out the photo album from the closet and wiped the dust off of it.

       I found my favorite picture of Uncle Avery: The one of him with me when I was seven, at a botanical garden exhibit. We stood in front of a wild flower display, me grinning with my gap-toothed smile and holding a popsicle, him crouched beside me making his growling face, his hand blurred in imitation claw action. I took it out of the photo album.

       I slipped it into the frame and put it on my dresser, admiring. I hadn’t seen it in too long; I’d had it in the photo album as if to preserve his memory through protection. But now, it seemed to me that his memory was better preserved by experiencing it every day instead of locking it away in a “safe” place . . . it was liable to be forgotten there. My memory needed to be kept fresh; like one of his blooming sunflowers, it couldn’t be enjoyed when it was packed away.

       I counted my change. More than enough to buy the textbook. And now, the “worthless” scrap of paper was back where it belonged: In circulation. A hundred dollars wasn’t much, but just a tenth of it had helped to water my garden of memories, and that was worth a million.

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