What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
I do not cry easily. Nine years of that kind of nursing wears it out of you. But I stood in that closet of a kitchen over the drugstore and I cried until my ribs hurt, with two pairs of socks on, and somewhere in the middle of it I noticed that I was finally warm.
Then I looked under W.
The little gray book was a passbook from Marlow Savings Bank. They still give them out, if you are old enough to ask for one. On the inside cover it said, typed: Bernice M. Castle, in trust for Robin L. Castle.
The pages were stamped in purple ink, line after line, page after page. Three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars. One hundred and eleven of them, with a few cents of interest posted every quarter.
The last line read $34,612.40.
I took it to the bank on my lunch hour Monday. The teller was a woman I have filled prescriptions for since she was expecting her first. She looked at the book and at the death certificate and at my license, and she looked up at me.
“This was never part of your mother’s estate, hon,” she said. “That’s what the trust line is for. It’s been yours since the day she passed. She came in with her cane and asked me three different ways to be sure.”
When I got back to the store, I waited until the counter was clear.
“Kim,” I said. “Did my mother ask you about the apartment?”
Kim took off her reading glasses.
“In October,” she said. “She had Walt drive her down. She sat right in that chair by the blood pressure machine and made me promise to hold it for you and not say a word until you’d found some letter. She tried to give me the first month in cash.” She wiped at her eye with the heel of her hand. “I’ve turned two people away since Thanksgiving. I thought you’d never ask me.”
Michelle flew in Tuesday night. She did not go to the motel. She drove the rental car straight to Mill Street and called me from the driveway.
“I’m at the house,” she said. “Will you come?”
The furnace had been running for two days by then, but a cold house takes its time forgiving you. It was fifty-eight in the kitchen. The square hole in the plaster was still open, with the new copper shining inside it like a filling in a tooth. She was standing in front of it in her good coat.
On the counter she had laid out the oil ticket, Jeff Purdy’s bill, and my adding machine tape from February. She had put them in a row.
“Four thousand and eighty dollars,” she said, “since the first of February. I added it on the plane.” She turned around. Her eyes were red, and I do not think it was the flight. “Robin. How did you do this for nine years?”
It was not what I had expected her to say.
“One envelope at a time,” I said. “Same as you. Only nobody mailed them to me with a total.”
“On what you make.”
“I worked Saturdays. I didn’t go anywhere. I drove the Buick.”
“And then the rest of it. Her. The lifting and the nights.” She put her hand flat on the cold counter. “I stood in here an hour before I called you. I couldn’t make myself take my coat off. I kept thinking, she did this in February with a sick woman in the dining room, and I flew in at Christmas with a bathrobe and told her she looked tired.”