The Saturdays I Took Next Door

I did not pick up the card yet. I could not. I picked up the 2011 bundle instead, and the bills were the old kind, soft as cloth.

And then I remembered.

The very first Saturday. The spring of 2011. I had finished the kitchen floor and I was putting the bucket away, and Helen was at the table with her purse open. She held out a ten-dollar bill.

“Helen, put that away,” I had said. “You don’t pay family.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with it?”

And I had laughed, and I had said, “I don’t know. Put it in a tin.”

She had caught my hand that day as I went by. That was the first time she squeezed it twice.

I sat down at my own kitchen table because my legs would not hold me.

“She put one in every Saturday you came,” Debra said. She had gotten her voice back, some of it. It came out rough. “Agnes told me. I called her last night. One ten, every Saturday, when you went out to shake the rugs. Agnes said Mom called it your wages. She said Mom told her, ‘She won’t take it from my hand, so she’ll take it when I’m gone.'”

Nobody said anything.

“I had it in a box with the flour canister,” Debra said. “For a garage sale. I’d have sold it for fifty cents, Tina. I never even picked it up to feel how heavy it was.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I didn’t read the lid.” She was crying again. “It was right there. It had your name on it, and I didn’t read it, because it never crossed my mind there’d be anything in that house with your name on it. That’s the part I can’t get around. I gave you the vacuum.”

“It’s a good vacuum.”

She laughed, one wet awful bark of a laugh, and then she cried harder.

“I told myself you liked doing it,” she said. “All those years. I told myself Tina likes to clean, it’s just her way, she’d be doing it anyhow. It let me off. I came Sundays and took Mom to church and did her checkbook, and I thought that was the hard part.”

“That was a hard part,” I said. “You drove her to every one of those appointments in Dubuque. You sat with her for the hip. I know what you did, Deb. I never thought you didn’t love her.”

“But you showed up.”

“So did you. Different days.”

She shook her head. She would not take it, and I did not push it on her. Some things a person has to carry home herself.

It was Mark who moved then. He came over and pulled out the chair next to mine and sat down heavily, and he looked at the tin and not at either of us.

“I stood on that porch with Dad’s workbench in my arms,” he said, “and I watched you hand my wife a vacuum cord, Deb. And I didn’t say a word. So don’t take all of it. Leave some of that for me.”

Debra reached over and gripped her little brother’s arm. It was the first time I had seen her touch him since the funeral.

She stayed for supper. It was only goulash, but she ate two helpings, the way people do when they have finally stopped holding something in. Before she left she went out to her car and came back with a paper grocery sack and handed it to me without a word.