The Saturdays I Took Next Door

“Then I expect it’s in your garage.”

“What’s in it?”

“You’ll see when you read the lid,” Agnes said. “Which is all your mother ever needed anybody to do.”

Then she turned around and came back up the stoop, and I held the screen door for her, and she sat down at her table and picked up her cold coffee as if she had only stepped out to check the weather.

Debra stood at the fence a moment longer. Then she went and got her box off the hood of the car, and put it in the back seat, and drove away. She left Helen’s garage door standing open. I walked over and pulled it down myself before I went home.

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I told Mark that night. He listened to all of it with his elbows on the table.

“A tin,” he said.

“With my name on it. That’s all I know.”

“I never heard a word about it.”

“Nobody did but Agnes.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. “I’ll drive over to Deb’s.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Tina, if Mom left you something.”

“Then your sister knows it now, and she knows the whole street knows it. Let her do what she’s going to do. I want to see what that is.”

That was the truest thing I said all summer. I did not care so much what was in the tin. I did want to know what Debra would do when it was up to her.

She did not call Sunday. She did not call Monday. On Tuesday I cleaned the Hoffmans’ and Lisa’s and came home with my knees aching and started supper.

At a quarter past six there was a knock at the kitchen door, the back one, the one family uses.

It was Debra.

She was holding a tall square tin against her chest with both arms, the way you would hold a child who had fallen asleep. A saltine tin, red and white, gone soft at the corners with age. There was a strip of yellowed masking tape across the lid. And there was my name on it in blue ballpoint, in Helen’s slanting grade-school hand, with the apostrophe and everything.

Tina’s.

Debra’s face was swollen. She had been crying for a good while before she ever got in the car. She opened her mouth and nothing came out. She tried again. Her chin shook, and she shut her mouth and just stood there on my back step holding out her mother’s tin.

I had fifteen years of things I could have said in that doorway. I am glad I did not say even one.

“Come in, Deb,” I said. “Coffee’s on.”

She came in. She set the tin in the middle of my kitchen table, very carefully, and then she sat down in Mark’s chair and put her hands over her face.

Mark had come in from the garage. He stood by the refrigerator and did not move.

I lifted the lid.

It was money.

It was ten-dollar bills, bundled with rubber bands, packed in on their sides as tight as the tin would hold. Each bundle had a little strip of paper folded around it under the rubber band, the kind of strip you cut off the edge of an envelope. Each strip had a year on it in that same blue hand.

2011. 2012. 2013.

The rubber bands on the oldest bundles had gone dry and brittle and broke when I touched them.

On top of all of it, face up, was one of the plain cards Helen kept in her desk for sympathy notes.