The Total My Mother in Law Handed Me

The slip of paper came across my kitchen table folded once, the way you would pass a note in church.

My mother-in-law slid it with two fingers. It went past the paper plates and the bowl of pretzels and stopped against the edge of the cake I had stayed up until midnight frosting.

“Since we are giving credit,” Judy said.

I did not pick it up right away. I looked at my mother first.

Mom was sitting beside me in her good blouse, the blue one with the pearl buttons she wears to funerals and graduations. She had driven up from Waverly that morning, gone to church with us, and spent the last hour on my kitchen floor letting Owen pull her glasses off. About thirty seconds earlier she had looked around our half of the duplex, at the secondhand table and the high chair and the baby in his paper hat, and said the thing that started it.

“I look at this house and this boy,” she had said, “and I think, you two did every bit of this on your own.”

She meant it kindly. My mother has never said an unkind thing at a table in her life.

Judy heard something else.

I unfolded the paper.

It was a page torn from a small spiral notebook, with the little paper fringe still hanging off the top. There were only two lines on it, in blue ink, in the careful slanted handwriting Judy learned in a country school.

M and B, through October.

$11,406.

The total was underlined twice.

“I am not asking for it today,” Judy said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. She might have been telling me the time. “I just think a girl ought to know what she has been given. Before she says she did it on her own.”

“Judy,” my mother said. “I was the one who said that.”

“I heard who said it, Pat.”

Under the table my mother’s hand found my knee and held on.

Owen banged his spoon on the high chair tray. He was one year old that day. He had frosting on his sleeve already from where he had reached while I was not looking, and he was watching all of us with his mouth open, the way he watched the ceiling fan.

“It is all in there,” Judy said, and she patted the purse in her lap. “Every bit. Down to a gallon of milk.”

I knew the notebook. Everybody in that family knew the notebook.

It was a little red Mead spiral, the kind that fits in a shirt pocket, and it lived in the side pouch of her purse with a blue ballpoint pen pushed through the wire. When one filled up she bought another one just like it and copied the running total onto the first page. Half of Chillicothe worked for Mead at one time or another, so I suppose it was the loyal thing to buy.

The first time I saw it, Brian and I had been engaged about a month. I was twenty-three. We were sitting at Judy and Gene’s kitchen table out on the county road, and Judy had just written us a check for eighteen hundred dollars so we could put down the deposit and first month on the duplex. I was so grateful I could hardly talk.

Then she took the notebook out, clicked her pen, and wrote it down while we sat there.

M and B, deposit, 1,800.00.

She blew on the ink, closed the cover, and put it back in her purse.