The Check With Three Names On It

I could not answer her. I pressed that apron against my face, right there in front of the two of them, and it smelled like the kitchen and like the lavender soap my mother kept in her dresser, and I cried the way I had not let myself cry at the funeral because there had been too many people to thank.

Bev brought me a chair. Mrs. Thornton brought me coffee, with the cream already in it, the way Mom took hers.

They did not ask me one question about my brothers. They sat with me and talked about whether the freezer needed defrosting until I could breathe again.

When I could, I got my checkbook out.

“Put that away,” Mrs. Thornton said.

“I’d like to pay for my mother’s lunch.”

“I know you would. And I am not taking a check from a grieving daughter across my own counter. We don’t do that here.” She patted my hand. “If a person wants to give to the dinner fund, it goes through the church office like any other gift, and Dale writes it in the book. But nobody owes it, Renee. I want you to hear me say that. Nobody owes it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She let me keep the apron.

I sat in my car in the church lot for a long time afterward with it folded on the seat beside me.

I could have called Doug right then. I had my phone in my hand. I even had his name up on the screen.

But I have known Doug for 44 years. He would have had an answer ready before I finished the question. It would have been a good one, too. There would have been a deposit I did not know about, or a misunderstanding with the funeral home, or a tone I was taking with him. By the end of the call I would have been apologizing, and he would have been telling me to get some sleep.

So I put the phone away, and I drove home, and I thought about it for two days.

What I kept coming back to was simple. Those women had fed 140 people for my mother and asked for nothing. And my family, by Doug’s own figures, believed that lunch was worth paying for. I had already paid my third of it. The money just had not gone where the paper said.

I could chase my $1,200 later, or never. The women who cooked came first. I wanted them made whole before I said one word to anybody about what I was owed.

On Thursday night I wrote another check.

I made it out to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, for $1,200.

Jeff came in while the ink was still wet. I had told him everything on Tuesday night, and he had wanted to drive to Lincoln and have a word with my brother on his own front step. I asked him not to. I told him I needed to do this my own way. He did not like it, but he said all right.

Now he stood behind my chair and read the check over my shoulder.

“That’s the furnace again,” he said.

“I know it is.”

“That’s twenty-four hundred, Renee.”

“I know that, too.”

“When my dad died,” Jeff said, “your mother was down in that basement at six in the morning. I came in to carry chairs and she had forty pounds of potatoes peeled already. She made me sit down and eat a roll.” He cleared his throat. “We can wear sweaters.”

He went to the junk drawer and came back with a stamp.

I had left the memo line for last.