The Bank Card He Called Severance

The card I would not touch

But I never touched that card.

Not for food. Not for the bus. Not when my one good pair of shoes split along the seam by the toe and I taped them from the inside with duct tape so it would not show. Not when the heater quit for three days in February and I sat wrapped in a quilt watching my own breath.

Some people would call that pride, and maybe part of it was pride, I will give you that. But mostly I could not stand the thought of it. I could not stand the idea of Roy Sutter deciding that thirty-seven years of my life were worth three thousand dollars and a few months of getting by. If I spent it, I would be agreeing with him. I would be signing my name to his math.

Thirty-seven years. I washed his work shirts and got the diesel and the hog smell out of the collars. I raised our two children mostly on my own hours while he was in the field or at the co-op or wherever it was he really went those last years. I remembered every one of his prescriptions and his brother’s birthday and the anniversary of his father’s death, and I smoothed things over at every Thanksgiving when he drank too much and got mean with his words. I sat up nights with sick babies and I sat up nights with him when the crops failed, and in the end he handed me a bank card like it was a gold watch and a handshake at the end of a shift.

So the card went in a shoebox, and the shoebox went on the shelf in the closet, and I decided I would rather eat crackers in hot water for the rest of my life than let him be right.

The lie I told my children

I have two children. Rachel is thirty-eight and lives two hours north near Fort Wayne with her husband and three kids. Wade is thirty-five and works at a warehouse down in Indianapolis, and he has a little girl of his own and a truck payment that eats him alive.

They helped when they could. Rachel would mail me grocery gift cards tucked inside birthday cards that were not for my birthday, and she would write “just because, Mom” on them so I could pretend it was a treat and not charity. Wade paid my phone bill twice when it was about to get shut off, and he never once made me ask.

But they had their own kitchen tables and their own late-night arithmetic, the kind we all do now, moving the same three hundred dollars from one bill to another and hoping nobody notices it is the same three hundred dollars. So when they called, and they called every Sunday, I learned to make hunger sound like being busy.

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” I would say. “Just came in from cleaning the Hendersons’ place, I’m wore out. No, I ate already. Big lunch. You go on and take care of those babies.”

I got so good at it. That is the part I am most ashamed of now, how good I got at it. I could make an empty cupboard sound like a full and busy life, and they believed me because they wanted to and because I made it easy. A mother learns to do that. We spend our whole lives making our troubles small so our children do not have to carry them.