The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

“I do the books,” he said. “You know that. Every Sunday I write down every envelope. Your mother’s number, I’ve wrote it down two thousand times, I suppose. More.” He cleared his throat. “After the funeral I left her line in the ledger. I couldn’t see my way to crossing it out before the year was up. So every Sunday since, there’s been her number and a blank.”

“Six blanks,” I said.

“Five now.” He patted the bag. “I’m going to go in there and write ten dollars beside October the eighteenth. And I don’t mind telling you I am going to enjoy it.”

He looked over at Dad’s pickup, idling at the end of the lot with Darla in the passenger seat in my black coat.

“She a good woman?” he asked.

I thought about the two fingers on the envelope. I thought about the gooseflesh on her wrists.

“I believe she might be,” I said.

“Well,” Mr. Tuma said. “Your dad’s a good man that never had to hang up his own coat. You go easy on the one and not so easy on the other.”

That was the most I had ever heard him say at one time.

I drove out to the farm at two that afternoon. I gave my father time to take Darla home and time to sit with it.

He was at the kitchen table when I came in, and he had not turned the light on. The calendar from the co-op was still hanging by the phone, turned to October, with my mother’s writing in the squares. Glen, knee, 10:15. Altar Society. Rachel’s birthday, with a little star. On the counter sat one of Darla’s Pyrex dishes, scrubbed clean, with a strip of masking tape on the bottom that had her name on it.

I hung the camel coat on the second hook by the back door, where it belonged, and I came and sat down across from him.

“You’re wearing it,” he said.

“I wore it home.”

“Looks right on you.”

“Dad.”

“I know.” He rubbed his face with both hands. He has big hands, cracked at the knuckles, and they made a sound against his whiskers. “I know it. You don’t have to line it out for me.”

“I think I do, though. Once.”

He nodded at the table.

So I told him, and I did not raise my voice, because I never have with him and because he would have gotten up and gone to the shop.

“You didn’t just hand her a coat this morning,” I said. “You took Mom off her hook and you put her on another woman’s back, and then you walked that woman into Mom’s church, past Mom’s grave, in front of everybody who ever sat behind her. And when it went wrong you stood at the font and looked at the floor and let Darla take it. She took it, Dad. All of it. She stood there and took what was yours.”

He did not argue. I had half expected him to. My father is not a man who is easily told.

“She tell you what I said to her?” he asked. “When I gave it to her?”

“She said you held it open like it was a horse blanket.”

He winced. “That’s about right.”

He was quiet a while. The furnace kicked on. Out the window the yard light had come on already, the way it does in late November when the afternoon gives up early.