The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

And there were people. That was the other thing. It was ten minutes before Mass and half the parish was coming through those double doors, stamping their feet, shaking off the cold. The Hansens. The Wiese boys and their wives. Old Mrs. Kratke with her walker. Mr. Tuma, who has been an usher at St. Joseph’s since before I made my First Communion, standing by the inner door with a stack of bulletins.

Every one of them had seen that coat in the fourth pew on the left for thirty-five years. Every one of them was seeing it now.

I could have said it. I had the sentence right there in my mouth. That is my mother’s coat. Take it off.

I will tell you why I did not, because I have been asked.

I was not going to raise my voice in my mother’s church over my mother’s coat. She would have been mortified. And when I looked at Darla, standing there with her fingers on that collar and her eyes going from me to my father and back, I understood that she was not the one who took it off the hook.

So I finished hanging up my own coat. I smoothed my dark dress. I folded my hands in front of me.

“It looks lovely on you,” I said.

Darla let out her breath. I think she had been holding it since the parking lot.

“Would you do one thing for me?” I said.

“Of course, honey.”

“Check the left pocket.”

She started to smile, like I was making a joke she did not quite follow. Then she looked at my face, and she stopped.

Here is what I knew, and Darla did not.

My mother, Margaret, did her offering envelope on Wednesday nights.

Not Saturday. Not Sunday morning in the car with a pen that would not write. Wednesday, after the supper dishes were dried and put up, she sat down at the kitchen table with the box the parish mails out, the little white envelopes with the date printed on each one and our family’s number, 114, in the corner. She took the one for the coming Sunday. She wrote the amount on the line in blue ballpoint, in the slanted schoolgirl hand the Sisters had taught her. She put a ten-dollar bill inside and licked the flap.

Then she got up, walked to the back door, and slid it into the left pocket of her Sunday coat.

“So Sunday cannot catch me without it,” she used to say.

It was two dollars when I was small. It was five by the time I graduated. It had been ten for a long time. My parents were never people with much to spare, and ten dollars was what she had decided she could give every single week of the year without ever once having to skip, and she never did skip. Calving, harvest, the blizzard of 2009, the Sunday she had me. If she could not get there, the envelope got there. She sent it with a neighbor.

There was one other thing in that pocket. A holy card from her own mother’s funeral, my Grandma Agnes, who died in 1986. Our Lady of Perpetual Help on the front, and on the back my grandmother’s name and her dates and a prayer. It had been folded in half so long it had gone soft as a piece of flannel. When Mom got the camel coat in 1991, the card moved over from the old navy one, same pocket.