The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
The room did not go instantly silent, the way it does in a movie. It went silent the way a country church fellowship hall actually goes silent, which is to say that four or five separate conversations near enough to hear simply stopped, one after another, like dominoes falling slow, until Ardell Pruitt had her hand frozen on the coffee urn spigot and Pastor Dale had turned halfway around from the cake table with a paper plate still in his hand.
“Mama, this isn’t really the place.”
“I think it’s exactly the place,” Mabel said, and her voice did not rise one note. “You asked me in my own kitchen five weeks ago to trust you with something I worked nine years to put together. I did trust you. I have asked you for it back in that same kitchen, private, more than once, and you have not brought it, and you have barely looked at me since. So I am asking you here, in front of the people who have known us both our whole lives, because I think maybe you need them standing here with you to finally tell me the truth. Where is my money, Carol?”
I watched my aunt’s face go through about four different things in the space of maybe three seconds, defensiveness, and then something that looked almost like relief, the strange relief of a person who has been carrying a heavy thing alone and is finally about to be allowed to put it down, even if putting it down hurts.
“I spent some of it,” Carol said. Her voice had dropped so low I had to lean to hear it, and I don’t think she meant for the whole room to hear it either, but a fellowship hall holds sound the way a church sanctuary does, close and clean, and every person standing within twenty feet heard her say it.
“How much,” Mabel said.
“Fourteen hundred. Dwayne’s hours got cut back to part time at the plant in July, and then Cody’s truck transmission went out, and the light bill was two months behind, and I kept telling myself I’d put it back before you ever noticed it gone, and then I couldn’t, and every Sunday I didn’t bring it I just felt worse, and I didn’t know how to say it, so I just… stopped saying anything at all.”
She was crying by then, not loud, just her shoulders shaking and her hand coming up to cover her mouth, and I want to tell you honestly that some old hard part of me wanted my grandmother to let her stand there in it a minute longer than she did. Mabel did not. She reached out and took Carol’s free hand, the one not covering her mouth, and held it the way she has held that hand since it was a baby’s hand forty some years ago.