The Funeral Money My Brother Moved

We sat her at the head of the table, the way she’d sat at that table for forty years, and Ruth sat at her right hand, and Dennis sat across, and Brenda stood behind his chair with her hand on his shoulder, and Jeff stood by the stove where he could see the whole room, and I sat next to Mom on her left.

Ruth did not raise her voice either. She is built like our mother, small and square shouldered, and she folded her hands on the table in front of her the way she used to fold them in a church pew, and she looked at Dennis for a long moment before she said anything at all, and I watched my fifty two year old brother go very still under that look, the exact stillness of a fourteen year old boy rinsing a coffee urn.

“Dennis,” she said, “your mother is sitting right here, and she is clear today, clearer than she’s been in a month, and I think she ought to be the one who asks you this, not me.”

And then she turned to our mother, and she took her hand, and she said, gently, the way you’d wake somebody from a nap you didn’t want to startle, “Alvina. Ask your son where your funeral money went.”

Mom’s eyes moved from Ruth to Dennis, and for one terrible second I watched her try to find the thread of the conversation in a mind that sometimes let threads slip right through its fingers, and then I watched her find it, the way she used to find a dropped stitch in her knitting without even looking down.

“Dennis,” she said, and her voice was the voice she used when we were small and had tracked mud onto her clean floor, not loud, just final. “Where is the money I had Myron Severson help me put by. The eleven thousand. Peg tells me it isn’t where I left it.”

The kitchen went so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on in the basement.

Dennis looked at his coffee cup. He looked at Brenda’s hand on his shoulder. He looked, finally, at our mother, and I saw something crack open in his face that I had not seen since he was a boy, not bitterness, not the flat reasonable tone from the kitchen that Tuesday, but something closer to the truth of him underneath all of it.

“I moved it into my account, Mom,” he said. “I was behind on the truck. I was going to put it back.”

“Behind on the truck,” Mom repeated, and she was quiet a moment, turning that over. “Dennis. I worked thirty years at the creamery and I put a little by every month for eleven years so that when I go, neither you nor your sister has to scrape together money you don’t have to bury me decent, next to your father. That money was never sitting there doing nothing. It was doing its job the whole time, same as it’ll do its job the day Myron needs it. You didn’t borrow from an account, Dennis. You borrowed from the day I die.”