The Total My Mother in Law Handed Me

“It is Tuesday,” I said. “I am off Tuesdays.”

It was Thursday. She was in no shape to check.

The fourth line: Your hair, in the kitchen sink.

After they fixed her arm she could not lift it over her head for two weeks, and she was not allowed to get it wet. Judy is a woman who has had her hair done every Friday of her adult life. She would rather have gone without food. So I stood her at her own kitchen sink with a towel around her shoulders, and I washed her hair with the sprayer and set it on her pink rollers the way she showed me, and neither of us said one word about it. When I finished she looked in the hand mirror and touched the side of it.

“That will do,” she said.

From Judy, that is a parade.

The fifth line: Christmas dinner, your kitchen, your recipes.

That first Christmas on the machine she could not stand up long enough to cook. She was going to cancel it. I went out there the day before with her recipe box and made every dish in her own kitchen, in her own pans, with her sitting on a stool telling me I was doing the dressing wrong. I was doing the dressing wrong. She was right about the sage. When the family came, everybody said it tasted just like always, and she let them think so, and so did I.

I looked at the five lines.

I did not put a dollar sign on any of them. I could not have if I tried. What is the going rate for a Tuesday?

I did not add them up.

At the bottom, where her total was on the other side, I wrote two words.

No charge.

Then I capped the pen and held it out to her with the slip.

“Every line in your book is true, Judy,” I said. “I want to say that first, in front of my mother. We needed every one of them. We would not be in this house without you. I have never said we did it by ourselves, and I never will.”

She took the pen. She did not take the slip yet.

“This is not a bill,” I said. “I am not adding anything up, and I am not keeping a book on you. I only did not want you thinking it ever went just the one way. You are family. That is all the back of it says.”

She took the slip.

She got her reading glasses out of her purse and put them on, and she read it.

It was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming. Owen had stopped banging his spoon. Even he seemed to know.

I watched her eyes go down the lines. They stopped on the fourth one a long time.

When she looked up, her face had gone hard, the way a person’s does when she has been hurt and intends not to show it.

“Well,” she said. “So now I owe you.”

“No, ma’am.”

“That is what this is. You have made out a bill.”

“Read the bottom, Judy.”

She looked down again.

“No charge,” she read. Her mouth worked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it says. I am not keeping a book on you. I never was.”