The Twenty Dollars My Sister Gave Mom

I sat at my kitchen table with that coffee can and I cried a little, I will admit it.

Seventy years. Forty-one of them on those little wooden chairs in the church basement. And I could not buy her a decent pair of shoes.

That same week I was helping Mom clean out her hall closet, and on the top shelf I found a hat box.

There was no hat in it. It was full of Sunday school attendance books, the little blue ones the church used to hand out, one for every year back to 1980. Every book had the children’s names down the side in Mom’s round handwriting and a row of gold stars after each one. Tucked in among them were other things. Thank-you notes in crayon. Funeral cards. A photograph of a baby wrapped in a quilt I recognized, because I remembered her piecing it at this very kitchen table.

And her address book, the old red one with the rubber band around it, with forty years of crossed-out and written-over addresses.

“Oh, don’t mess with all that,” Mom said from the hallway. “That’s just old stuff. I ought to burn it.”

“Can I take it home and look through it?”

“What on earth for?”

“I just want to,” I said.

She let me. She would let anybody have anything.

I sat up three nights with that hat box. I made a list on a yellow legal pad, and when I was done there were a hundred and twelve names on it.

Children she had taught, who were forty and fifty now. Families she had cooked for when somebody was sick or laid off or buried. People she had sat up with. Mom used to sit nights with the dying, back before the hospital had anybody to do it. She would work the lunch line, come home, feed us, and then go sit in a kitchen chair by somebody’s bed till daylight so the family could sleep.

I did not know how to find half of them. I asked the church secretary, a patient woman named Linda, and she pulled the old directories out of a filing cabinet for me. I asked at the school. I asked the ladies at the beauty shop, which in a town of nine thousand is the same as putting it on the radio.

Then I spent my forty dollars, and twenty-one more that Jim handed me without a word, on stamps and a box of plain envelopes.

I wrote every letter by hand. They all said about the same thing.

“My mother, Norma, turns seventy on Saturday, July 18. She does not know I am writing to you. I can’t afford to give her much this year. But I have been thinking that she spent her whole life giving things away, and I wonder if she ever knew where any of it went. If she ever gave you something, would you bring it back to her for one afternoon? Bring the thing itself, or bring what it turned into. Come up the alley behind her house at four o’clock. Park at the church. You don’t have to stay long. She would just like to see you.”

I put my phone number at the bottom, and I mailed a hundred and twelve of them the first week of May.

By the Fourth of July, eleven people had answered.