The Saturdays I Took Next Door

“Fill it with what?”

“That’s not mine to say. That was hers to say, and she meant to. She told me at Christmas. She said, ‘Agnes, I’m going to tell Mark about the tin come Easter, so there’s no confusion.’ And then she didn’t get to Easter.”

Helen had her stroke on a Thursday in March. She was gone by Friday night. There had been no time for anybody to tell anybody anything.

I felt something turn over in my chest, and I held very still until it settled.

“I cleaned that pantry for fifteen years,” I said. “I never saw a tin with my name on it.”

“Of course you didn’t. She kept it behind the jars and she moved it Friday nights before you came. She was sly about it. She was proud of how sly.”

I could see it, was the thing. I could see Helen on a Friday night with her bad hip, up on her toes, hiding something from me on her own shelf and pleased as a girl about it.

“The girls cleared that pantry in April,” I said. “It all went in boxes. I watched Deb carry them out.”

“Without reading the lid.”

“I guess so.”

Agnes reached for her cane.

“Let it be, Agnes,” I said. I put my hand on her arm. “Please. I’m not going to go asking after it. Whatever it is. It’s their mother’s house and they’ve had enough to do. I won’t have it said I came around after the funeral with my hand out.”

“I didn’t say you would,” she said. “I’d think less of you if you did. Nobody is going to say a word about you, Tina.”

She got up. It takes her a minute. She went to the back screen door and pushed it open with the rubber tip of her cane and stepped out onto the back stoop, and I followed her as far as the door, because I could not think what else to do.

Debra was coming down Helen’s driveway on the other side of the wire fence with a cardboard box in her arms, headed for her car.

“Debra, honey,” Agnes called. “Come here a minute.”

Debra stopped. She set the box on the hood of the Buick and came over to the fence, wiping her hands on her shorts. She is fifty-eight and she looked every day of it that morning, hot and dusty and worn out. Emptying your mother’s house is the last hard chore there is.

She saw me in the doorway behind Agnes and her face did that thing again.

“Morning, Mrs. Pruitt.”

“What did you girls do with your mother’s tin?” Agnes said. “The saltine tin off the pantry shelf. The one that says Tina’s on the lid.”

She did not say it loudly. She did not have to. Mr. Becker was in his side yard with the hose and Lisa Schroeder was on her porch with her coffee. It was a still morning, and Agnes Pruitt has a voice that carries.

Debra just looked at her.

“I don’t know about any tin.”

“Well, I do. Your mother kept it fifteen years and she told me who it was for. I had coffee with her every Saturday of that time, Debra. It was meant to go to Tina, and I believed it had. I find out this morning it has not.”

“We boxed up the pantry,” Debra said. “It was all just canisters. Flour and sugar. Old cookie tins. I’ve got them in my garage for a sale.”