The Coffee Can My Aunt Took

The money itself, I should tell you what it actually was, because it was not some windfall or some mystery inheritance. It was egg money and quilt money and the leftover five and ten dollar bills Mabel had been folding into that can since the spring after Earl died, nine years of it, a little at a time, from selling brown eggs to the ladies at church for two dollars a dozen, and from the lap quilts she still pieces by hand and sells at the fall festival for forty dollars apiece, and from whatever was left over most months out of her Social Security check after the light bill and the propane and her blood pressure pills. She was not saving for a cruise or a car. She told me, the second time she told me the story, looking down at her folded hands instead of at me, what the money was actually for.

“I don’t want you children to have to pay for my funeral,” she said. “Earl’s cost eleven hundred dollars more than the insurance covered, and your mother and I split that, and I remember exactly how it felt writing that check a week after I buried him. I never wanted anybody to have to feel that over me. That can was going to cover mine. Casket, the opening of the ground, the dinner after. I had it figured to the dollar, near about.”

That is the part that undid me more than the theft of it, if that is even the right word for what Carol did, because I am still not sure theft is the whole truth of it. It was not that my grandmother had lost two thousand dollars. It was that she had spent nine years quietly making sure she would never be a burden to anyone, one brown egg and one lap quilt at a time, and her own daughter had walked into that kitchen and called nine years of careful dignity a problem that needed solving by somebody other than Mabel herself.

I have to tell you where I fit into all of this, because it matters to what happened next. I am the one who drives out to Mabel’s now, on Wednesdays after work and most Sundays, a job that used to belong to both my mother and me together until my mother died three years ago this October, cancer that moved faster than any of us were braced for. Carol and I split the holidays and the doctor visits as best we can, but it has mostly fallen to me to be the one Mabel calls when the propane man is late or her blood pressure cuff quits working, and I have never once minded it, because somebody has to be the daughter who is still standing, and I was glad it could be me instead of nobody. What I did mind, sitting in that kitchen listening to her tell me about the can, was realizing that the other daughter still standing was the one who had done this to her.

I asked her what she wanted to do, because by then I had learned, the hard way, over forty four years of being her granddaughter, that Mabel generally already knows what she wants to do by the time she starts telling you the problem. She just likes you to arrive at it with her.