The Twenty Dollars My Sister Gave Mom

Daddy had been gone eleven years by then.

Mom still kept the garden. Tomatoes, pole beans, zinnias along the fence. She kept it on a bad hip and a Social Security check, and she gave most of it away over that fence before it ever saw her own table.

That is the thing you have to know about my mother. She gave things away. It was not a habit with her. It was closer to breathing.

She cooked in the cafeteria at the elementary school for twenty-six years. She taught the second and third grade Sunday school class at Calvary Baptist for forty-one. In all that time I do not believe a child ever went through her line hungry or sat in her class cold, whether or not the money was there, and it mostly was not.

So I cut the cake. I gave Mom the corner piece with the most frosting, because she always took the plain middle one and left the corners for us.

“Teresa, this is too much,” she said.

“It’s your birthday.”

“It’s just a Saturday,” she said, but she took the plate.

There were eleven of us in the yard at that point, and I had borrowed thirty folding chairs from the church. Stacy noticed that too.

“Expecting a crowd?” she said. She looked down the two long rows of empty brown chairs my son Ben had set up in the grass that morning.

“A few more might come by,” I said.

“On a Saturday in July.” She gave a small laugh. “Honey, people have lives.”

My husband, Jim, was over by the grill with a spatula. He looked at me across the yard. Jim is a quiet man, and he has a way of standing very still when he is angry. He was standing that way then.

I shook my head at him, just barely.

He turned the hot dogs.

Then I wiped the knife on a paper towel and laid it down, and I walked over to Mom’s chair, and I crouched beside it so my face was level with hers.

“Mom,” I said. “Your real present’s coming up the alley at four o’clock.”

She blinked at me. “My what?”

“Your real present. Four o’clock. So you stay right in this chair.”

“Teresa Ann.” She dropped her voice. “You and Jim cannot be spending money on me. I mean it. Not this year.”

“I didn’t spend hardly anything,” I said, and that was the truth.

Stacy had heard. She tilted her head.

“What did you do,” she said, “finance a recliner?”

“You’ll see.”

“I’d love to. But we need to be on the road by four thirty. Greg has a dinner.” She checked the gold watch on her wrist. It was ten minutes past two.

“Then you’ll be here,” I said.

Let me tell you what “not this year” meant.

In February the plant where Jim worked cut the second shift, and Jim with it. He picked up work driving a grain truck for a man out by Utica, but that is seasonal and it does not come with insurance. I had my job as an aide at the nursing home on the north side, thirty-two hours a week. In March our furnace quit. In April Ben’s truck needed a transmission so he could keep getting to his classes in Trenton.

I am not telling you this for pity. I am telling you so you understand that when I sat down in April to think about my mother turning seventy, I had forty dollars I could call my own, and I had it because I had been putting back two dollars a week in a coffee can since Christmas.