What The Movers Found In The Mattress

“Ma’am?” Cody said. “You want us to set it down?”

“Set it down,” I said. “Set it down flat. And can one of you go out to the shop and find me a seam ripper or a good knife?”

They laid it back down on the floor and Darrell went and came back with my dad’s old Case knife off the pegboard, and I knelt on the floor of that empty room and I slit the stitches my mother had made. My hands were not steady. I kept thinking I should call Dale and Joann first. I kept thinking I should not do this alone. But there is a kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes before you can stand to let anybody else see it, and I think I knew, kneeling there, that whatever was in that mattress was going to belong to all three of us, and that I owed it to them to go in first so I could be the one to carry it out into the light.

The stitches gave. I folded back the flap of ticking.

Inside, between the batting layers, laid flat and even like she had planned every inch of it, was my mother’s secret life.

Money, first. That was the heavy sound. Rolls of it, bound in rubber bands gone brittle and in twists of twine, tens and twenties and a lot of worn singles, some of the bills so old they were the small-portrait kind. They were not thrown in. They were sorted into envelopes, church-offering envelopes from Zion Lutheran, dozens of them, and on the face of each one my mother had written in her tight careful hand. I picked up the first one my fingers touched. It said, For Ruthie, in case. That is me. I am Ruth. I sat down flat on the floor with that envelope in my hand and I could not get a breath for a minute.

There were envelopes for all of us. For Dale, in case. For Joann, in case. There were envelopes marked for grandchildren, each by name, Tyler and Megan and little Pril who is not so little anymore, and there were two envelopes marked for grandchildren with no names at all, just for the next one and for the one after, because she had been saving for children who had not been born yet, who might never be born, on the chance that they would come and need something and she would not be here to give it to them. She had been dead two months and she was still trying to provide.