The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

Forty years, that card. She would put her hand in her pocket during the homily and I knew she had her thumb on it.

I had been at the farm that last Wednesday. I brought them a pot of chili because Dad had been to the knee doctor in Norfolk and Mom had driven him, and I figured she would be worn out. She was. She was gray around the mouth and she kept sitting down. But after supper she got out the box of envelopes anyway, and I dried dishes and watched her do the one for October 18, and I watched her walk it to the back door.

She died that Friday morning. She did up the breakfast dishes, sat down in her chair with the Norfolk paper, and that is where my father found her when he came in from the shop at ten. Her heart. The doctor said she would not have known a thing.

We buried her the following Tuesday in the cemetery beside the church, forty steps from the doors I was standing at.

Nobody thought of the coat. Nobody thought of the pocket. I thought of it, about a week after, standing in the back porch with my hand halfway out. I could not do it. If I took that envelope out, then she was not coming back for it.

So I knew exactly what was in there.

What I did not know, I found out along with everyone else.

Darla slid her hand into the pocket.

I watched her face change when her fingers found an edge. She drew out a small white envelope and held it in front of her, down low, and stared at it.

“What is,” she said, and did not finish.

Mr. Tuma had stopped handing out bulletins.

The date on the corner said October 18. Under it, on the line, in blue ink: $10.00. The zeros had the little tails my mother always put on them.

Darla’s mouth came open.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no.”

“That is my mother’s handwriting,” I said. I kept my voice down, and it came out gentler than I had planned. “It is her offering for that Sunday. She filled it out on a Wednesday and she was gone by Friday.”

That was all I said. I took a step back. Whatever came next was hers to decide.

“Rachel, I never.”

“I know you didn’t.”

My father had lifted his head. He had not taken one step toward us. The Hansens were standing just inside the door with the cold coming in behind them, and nobody was telling them to shut it.

Darla’s hand was shaking so the envelope fluttered. She turned it over, I think only to have somewhere else to look.

There was writing on the back flap.

I had not known about that. In all the years I watched my mother do her envelope, I watched her do the front. I never once saw the back. She must have turned it over after she sealed it, on her way to the door.

Two words, small, in the same blue ink.

For Glen.

Darla read it. I read it upside down from where I stood. And then she looked up, across the vestibule, at my father.

I will not forget his face. He could not read it from there, but he could read hers.

“What’s it say,” he said. It came out rough.