The Total My Mother in Law Handed Me

I have thought since about how that must have landed on her. Her own son, in front of the other grandmother. I did not enjoy it. I want that on the record. There was nothing in me that was glad.

Judy closed her purse. The clasp was loud.

She stood up. It took her a second, the way it does on the day after a chair day, and she held the edge of my table.

“Gene,” she said. “Get the car.”

Gene did not get the car.

He laid his fork across his plate. He looked up at his wife, and it was the gentlest look I have ever seen one person give another.

“Sit down, Judy.”

“I will not sit here and be…”

“Sit down, honey. You are not in trouble. But you are going to tell them where that notebook came from, or I am.”

She did not sit. She did not go, either. She stood there with one hand on the table and her purse against her stomach.

“That is nobody’s business,” she said.

“It got to be their business about four minutes ago.”

He waited. She pressed her lips together and looked at the window over my sink.

So Gene told it. He told it the way he tells everything, flat and short, turning his coffee cup a quarter turn at a time.

“Judy grew up out past Londonderry. Seven of them in a rented house with a hand pump in the yard. Her daddy cut timber when there was timber to cut. There was a little store at the crossroads that let folks run a tab, and the man kept it in a gray book under the counter.”

“Gene,” Judy said.

“She was nine. Her mother sent her down on a Saturday with a list. Flour, lard, a few things. Two miles. Store was full, it being Saturday. The preacher’s wife was in line right behind her.” He turned the cup. “The man got the book out and read their name off. Read what they owed out loud to the whole store. Forty-one dollars and seventeen cents. Said there would be no more till it was paid, and he took the flour out of her arms and put it back on the shelf.”

My mother put her hand over her mouth.

“She walked home two miles with an empty sack. Would not go in the house. Her mother found her in the smokehouse after dark.”

“I was not in the smokehouse,” Judy said. “I was behind it.”

“Behind it,” Gene said. “I stand corrected.”

Nobody laughed, but something in the room let go a little.

“She went to work at fifteen, washing dishes at the truck stop on 23. First paycheck, she bought herself a notebook. Wrote down every cent the family owed anybody in the county, and she paid it. All of it. Took her until she was nineteen. That store was the last one. She walked in and counted forty-one dollars and seventeen cents onto the counter and watched him draw the line through it.”

He looked around the table. At my mother. At Brian. At me.

“She has not owed a living soul since. And when there was nothing left to write on that side, she started writing on the other. What she gave.” He shrugged. “It is not a bill. I know it looks like one. I have been married to that book forty-one years. It is how she knows which side of the counter she is standing on. That is all it ever was.”

Nine years old, I thought.

The same age Brian was when he saw his name beside a ball glove.