I got it from the recycling.
I will explain that too, but not yet.
The Hessler Prize is a regional thing. It's not the Scholastic Awards and it's not anything people in New York would have heard of. It was started by a woman named Hilde Hessler, who owned a lumber company and died in 1998 and left her house on West Sixth Street to be a gallery, and every year since then the gallery has given one prize to an artist under eighteen in the six counties around the lake. It's ten thousand dollars, which goes into a college fund, and your piece hangs in the front room of the Hessler for the whole winter, and the paper comes and takes your picture next to it. That's it. That's the whole thing. But nobody in my family had ever been in the paper for anything except my grandfather's obituary and the time my mother's route got snowed in and she walked the last mile and a half on foot with her satchel over her head, and when the letter came in September saying I was a finalist, my mother read it standing up at the kitchen counter and then sat down on the floor. Not in a chair. On the floor, with her back against the dishwasher.
"Ten thousand dollars," she said.
"It's only if I win," I said. "There's five of us."
"Ten thousand dollars," she said again, and then she started laughing, and then she put the letter against her face and held it there, and I didn't know what to do so I sat down on the floor too.
Krista had come in from the back door right then, with her backpack, home from campus. She stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two of us on the linoleum.
"What happened," she said. "Who died?"
"Nobody died," my mother said. "Your sister's a finalist for the Hessler."