The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
I want to tell you about the coffee can itself, because I think it matters more than the dollar figure ever did. It is a plain red and white Folgers can, the old metal kind with the paper label that doesn’t get made anymore, and it did not start out as anybody’s savings. Earl kept roofing nails in it in his shop for thirty years, and after he died Mabel washed it out at her kitchen sink and started dropping her spare change in it instead, because, she told me once, she liked that it had his handwriting on the side where he’d marked the size of the nails inside, and it felt like he was still keeping something safe for her even with him gone. Every dollar she folded into that can over nine years went in on top of a dead man’s handwriting, which is a thing I did not understand the full weight of until Carol brought it back to the house that same Sunday afternoon, washed clean, and set it back in its spot under the sink behind the steel wool, where it has sat, as far as I know, every day since.
Carol came to Sunday dinner the next week, and the week after that, and she has not missed one since, and she brings forty dollars folded in an envelope every single time and sets it on the table without being asked, and Mabel takes it without making a show of it, and puts it straight into the can. Dwayne picked up extra hours hauling for a neighbor’s hay crew to help make up the rest faster, and by Thanksgiving, Carol told me crying in my kitchen while we shelled pecans, they will have put every dollar of it back plus a little more, because she wants her mother to have more cushion than she had before, not less.
That afternoon in my kitchen, Carol sat at my counter with a bowl of pecan halves between us and told me the rest of it, the part she had not said out loud even in the fellowship hall. She said the worst week of this whole thing was not the week she spent the money or even the week she had to admit it. It was the four weeks in between, every Sunday she sat across from her own mother and lied with her silence, telling herself one more week and I’ll have it back, one more week and nobody has to know. “I kept thinking if I just waited long enough, I could fix it before it ever had to be a thing,” she told me, turning a pecan over and over without cracking it. “And all that waiting did was make it a bigger thing. I should have walked back in that first Monday and told her the truth and let her be disappointed in me for one day instead of five Sundays.” I did not have much comfort to offer her beyond that, except to say that my grandmother had already forgiven her long before that Sunday at church, somewhere around the second week, and had only been waiting for Carol to let her say so out loud.