The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

The parish envelopes. Still more than a month of them left in it, every one blank. November 1. November 8. He thumbed past the ones that should have gone already until he came to December 6.

“Show me how she did it,” he said.

“There’s nothing to it. You write the amount on the line.”

“Show me anyway.”

So I showed him. He got the blue pen out of the cup by the phone, her pen, and he wrote $10.00 on the line in his big square printing, the same printing he uses on seed tags and grain tickets. It took up twice the room hers did. He got a ten out of his billfold and put it in. He licked the flap and made a face at the taste.

Then he turned it over.

He sat with the pen over that back flap for a long time. I looked out the window so he would not have me watching.

When I looked back he had written two words.

For Margaret.

He got up and carried it to the back door. He stood in front of that camel coat, and I saw his shoulders go up and come down. Then he reached past it and slid the envelope into the chest pocket of his own good jacket, the brown one he wears to church, hanging on the first hook.

“So Sunday can’t catch me without it,” he said, not to me.

He had one more thing to do, and he did it without my telling him. He went to the phone on the wall and dialed a number off a slip of paper stuck to the calendar.

“Darla,” he said. “It’s Glen. No, now, let me talk.” He turned his back to me, but it is a small kitchen. “I put you in a bad spot this morning. That was mine and none of it was yours, and I let you stand there and carry it by yourself. I’m ashamed of that. I wanted you to hear me say so.”

He listened.

“Well. That’s more than I’ve got coming.” He listened again. “Nine o’clock. If you want. And you wear your own coat, I’ll have heat in that truck if I have to lay under the dash all night.”

He very nearly did. He drove to the parts store in West Point first thing Monday, and the blower motor on that pickup is three screws and a plug up under the passenger side, and he was done in under an hour, bad knees and all. He called to tell me it blew hot enough to bake bread. He said, “She was right, it was nothing,” and then he had to get off the phone.

The next Saturday he and I did my mother’s closet.

I will not tell all of that. Some of it belongs to the two of us. I will say that he carried every box himself, and that he kept her apron with the rickrack, and that when we found her old navy coat at the very back, the one from before 1991, he checked the left pocket before I could. It was empty. He looked almost let down.

Sunday was the second of Advent. Two candles.