The Card My Mother In Law Carried
The department store was bright and cold and smelled of eleven kinds of perfume. They went to the handbag counter, because of course they did, and Thelma set her purse on the glass and began pointing, a silk scarf, a leather wallet, a small quilted bag the color of butter.
There were two women at the next counter over, sampling hand cream. I knew them both. I have known them since I was seven years old. They sit in the third pew on the left every Sunday, directly behind the Vances, and they run the church circle with the efficiency of a feed co-op. One of them had been to my father’s funeral and brought a ham.
They had not seen me yet. They had seen Thelma, and they gave her the small bright wave of women who are always pleased to be seen by someone important.
“Thelma! You’re a long way from home.”
“Shopping with my son,” Thelma said, and her voice had its church-supper warmth back. “And a friend of the family. A girl from the radio station.”
I stopped behind a display of umbrellas about twenty feet away.
The man behind the handbag counter wore a gray suit and a name tag that said ORRIN, MANAGER. He rang up the scarf and the wallet and the little butter-colored bag, and I watched Thelma take out the department store card and hold it out to him with a flourish.
He ran it.
He frowned at the screen. He ran it again. He leaned in, and he said something quietly, and Thelma said, “I beg your pardon?” and Orrin cleared his throat and said, in the careful voice of a man who has done this before and does not enjoy it, “Ma’am, the card has been closed by the account holder. I’m not able to process it. I would be glad to take another form of payment.”
It was the second one. The second decline of the day, in front of the church circle, in front of the girl in the white sundress, in front of my husband.
“Closed,” Thelma said.
“By the account holder, ma’am.”
“I am the account holder.”
“The account holder is listed as Sylvia Vance,” Orrin said. “You are an authorized user. Authorized users can be removed at any time.”
And that was the moment one of the church women turned around from the hand cream and said, in the clear soft voice that has carried through every funeral lunch in Wynne for thirty years, “Thelma, honey? Is something wrong with your card?”
I walked forward.
“Hello, Thelma,” I said.
She turned. And I will tell you, I have seen a lot of faces in the feed business, men who have lost a crop and men who have lost a bank, but I had never seen a face do what hers did. It did not crumple. It emptied. Every expression she owned left it at once, and what was left was the plain old woman under the hairspray, sixty-eight years old and standing in a store with no way to pay.
“Sylvia,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“This is not what it looks like.”
“It looks like my mother-in-law is buying shoes for my husband’s girlfriend with my money,” I said. I did not raise my voice. I did not need to. The department store had gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when everyone is pretending not to listen, and my voice carried across it like a bell. “Is it something else?”