The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
“I’m not asking you in front of these people to ruin you, Carol. I’m asking you in front of them because I raised you to tell the truth even when it costs you something, and you have been too ashamed to pay that cost alone. You don’t have to anymore.”
Dwayne, Carol’s husband, I did not even know was in the hall until he came across it then, slow, his cap still on his head, and stood next to his wife with his hand flat on her back, and he said, to Mabel, plain, “Mrs. Tackett, that money shouldn’t have gone anywhere but back to you and I take my share of blame for not making it right the day I knew it was spent. We’ll pay every dollar of it back, I don’t care if it takes us a year of five dollar weeks.”
“Six hundred’s still in the lockbox in the trunk,” Carol said, wiping her face with the back of her wrist. “I never could make myself spend the rest of it. I’ll go get it right now.”
She did. She walked out to the gray Buick in front of half the congregation and came back in with a steel lockbox and counted six hundred dollars into her mother’s hands right there at the coffee table, with Ardell Pruitt pretending very hard to be occupied with the sheet cake and Pastor Dale quietly steering the rest of the room back into conversation the way a good pastor knows how to do, giving them privacy inside a crowd.
Mabel did not count the bills in front of her. She folded them once and put them down in her purse, and then she did something I was not expecting, something that told me more about why she had really driven eleven miles that morning than any amount of money could have.
She reached up and smoothed a piece of Carol’s hair back from her face, the way you’d fix a little girl’s hair before a school picture, and she said, “I didn’t do this for the money, honey. I’ve got enough left to bury myself decent either way, and if I didn’t, your brother’s girls and Robin here would see to it, and that’s no shame on anybody. I did this because I was not going to let five more Sundays go by with my own daughter too ashamed to look at me. That was costing us both a great deal more than fourteen hundred dollars.”
Carol put her head down on her mother’s shoulder right there in the fellowship hall, the way grown women rarely let themselves do in public, and Mabel stood there and let her, patting her back slow, and over Carol’s bent head she caught my eye across the room and gave me the smallest nod, the kind that said, you can breathe now, it’s done.