What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

For when you are all at my table. Not before. Mom.

“What’s in it?” I had asked her.

“Never you mind.”

“Mom.”

“Cindy Lou.” She put her hand on top of the box, and the ring was still on it then, loose behind the knuckle. “You’ll put this on the top shelf of the hall closet behind the heating pad, and you’ll not open it, and you’ll not shake it, and when I’m gone and everybody’s fed, you’ll set it on this table with all of you sitting down. Promise me you won’t peek.”

“I promise.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I promise I won’t peek.”

And I never did. Not once in six months, not even the night she died, when I stood in that hall closet looking for a clean pillowcase and saw the corner of it behind the heating pad. I figured the ring was inside. I figured there was a note with a name on it. I will be honest and say I figured the name was mine.

So I told Tina the truth in the fellowship hall.

“She taped it shut herself and wrote on it. It gets opened at her kitchen table with the whole family sitting down. Those were her words.”

“Well, then.” Tina was already reaching under the table for her purse. “Let’s go.”

“There’s sixty people here, Tina.”

“And they’ll be here eating pie whether we’re here or not.”

“We’ll go when the dishes are done,” I said. “Mom said when everybody’s fed.”

It took another hour. I stood in that church kitchen and dried casserole dishes with a tea towel while my sister-in-law sat at the end of a folding table with her coat already on. I heard her tell Brenda, and then two of the ladies from Mom’s circle, that Dorothy had always promised her the diamond and that there was some kind of box and we were going over to settle it. She said it like a woman announcing she’d won a raffle.

Pastor Mike caught me at the back door while I was wrapping up what was left of the ham.

“Would you like me to come along, Cindy? Not as anything official. I’ll sit in a chair and keep my mouth shut.”

“She’d have asked you,” I said. “She fed you at that table every other Sunday for nine years.”

“She did,” he said. “And she handed me a box of cassette tapes every Monday morning. I’m going to miss being bossed.”

That was Mom’s ministry, the tapes. For thirty years she had sat in the third pew with a flat little recorder on the hymnal rack, the kind with the piano keys along the front, and taped every sermon. Then she copied them and carried them to people who couldn’t get to church. Mom said the people she visited didn’t want a sermon half as much as they wanted company. The tape was mostly her excuse for a visit.

We drove the four blocks to Clay Street. My husband Dale rode with me, and our girl Amy, who had come home from nursing school in Lexington. Randy and Tina were already in the driveway when we pulled up, and Kyle, their boy, was standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets. He is nineteen and he has his granddaddy’s ears, and he had cried harder at the graveside than any of us.