What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

Mom’s kitchen table is yellow with chrome legs. Randy sat down in Dad’s old chair at the head without thinking about it. Tina took the chair beside him and kept her coat on. Kyle sat across from his mother. Dale leaned in the doorway, and Amy took the stool by the telephone. Pastor Mike lowered himself into the chair by the window where he had eaten about two hundred Sunday dinners.

That left Mom’s chair, the one nearest the stove. Nobody took it. I didn’t either. I went to the hall closet.

It was right where I’d put it. Top shelf, behind the heating pad. I carried it into the kitchen in both hands and set it in the middle of the yellow table.

“Well, that’s her writing,” Randy said. His voice cracked on it.

Tina reached for the box.

“Hang on,” Randy said. He put two fingers on the edge of the table. “Tina. Maybe Cindy ought to. She’s the one Mom gave it to.”

“I don’t see that it matters who cuts it.”

“No,” I said. “Let her.”

Randy looked at me.

“She’s the one who asked,” I said. “Mom would want the one who asked.”

I think I had decided on the drive over that if there was a note in that box with my name on it, I wanted Tina to be the one who had to read it. That was as mean as I had it in me to be, and I’m not proud of it, and it turned out to be what my mother had planned on anyway.

I got Mom’s sewing scissors out of the drawer by the stove, the heavy black-handled ones nobody was ever allowed to use on paper, and I handed them to Tina with the handles first.

She cut the tape in one pull. She was already smiling. She had her left hand out a little, the fingers spread, and I don’t think she even knew she was doing it.

She lifted the lid.

Then my sister-in-law stopped smiling.

“What is this?”

Nobody could see but her. Kyle half stood up out of his chair.

“What is this?” Tina said again. “Is this a joke?”

She tipped the box toward the rest of us. There was no velvet in it. There was no ring box. Wedged in there with a folded dish towel around it to keep it from rattling was Mom’s little flat tape recorder, the one from the third pew, with a cassette already sitting behind the little window. Lying on top of it was an index card in blue ink.

Pastor Mike made a sound in his chest that was not quite a laugh.

“Oh, Dorothy,” he said.

Tina picked up the card with two fingers. She read it to herself, and I watched her mouth get small.

“What’s it say?” Randy asked.

“It’s nothing. It’s just her being…”

“Mama,” Kyle said. “Read it.”

She looked at her son. Then she looked at the card, and she read it out loud, in a flat voice, the way you read the back of a prescription bottle.

“To whoever has this lid in their hand. Read this card to the table in a good loud voice so I know everybody heard. One. Nobody gets up until the tape is over, and that includes you. Two. Randy, do not interrupt me. Three. Push the button on the far left. It says Play. I put new batteries in at Easter. If it won’t go, Cindy knows where the batteries are.”