What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
“You did always say that.”
“I’m so ashamed I can hardly look at you.”
I had the letter in my purse. I had not decided, driving over, whether I would show it to her. I found I had decided after all.
“Sit down,” I said. “Read this. Read all of it.”
She sat at our mother’s kitchen table and read it with her coat on. I watched her get to the part about the house. I watched her get to the part about the three hundred dollars, and she made a sound and put her fingers over her mouth.
“She told me it was a help with the oil,” she said. “Every Christmas I’d ask her, is it enough, Mom, and she’d say it was a help with the oil.” She looked up. “She never cashed a one of them?”
“She cashed every one of them.” I put the passbook on the table and opened it to the last page. “Then she walked them across the street.”
Michelle looked at that column of purple stamps for a long time.
“I did want to come,” she said. “I need you to know that. I’d say, I’m coming for a month, Mom, I’ll give Robin a rest, and she’d say, don’t you dare, I’m not having you see me on a commode. So I sent the money, because money was the thing she’d take.” Her voice gave out and came back. “I let that be enough. That part’s on me. She told me to stay away, but she didn’t make me listen.”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
I was not going to tell her it was nothing. It had not been nothing. But I pulled out the chair beside her, and I sat down.
“She shouldn’t have done it this way,” Michelle said. “Setting us up like a pair of nine-pins.”
“She couldn’t work out another one. She says so.”
“She could have just told us.”
“When did Mother ever just tell us anything?”
My sister laughed. It came out wet and surprised. I laughed too. It was the first time the two of us had laughed in that kitchen since our father was alive.
“So I paid you after all,” she said, and touched the passbook. “Just late.”
“You paid me on time. I just didn’t get the mail.”
There was a knock at the storm door. It was Walt, in his canvas coat, with a short piece of plywood under his arm to cover the hole in the wall until the plasterer could come. He stopped when he saw the two of us at the table with our faces the way they were.
“I can come back.”
“Don’t you move, Mr. Kowalski,” Michelle said. She got up and found her checkbook. “February’s plowing is a hundred and twenty. What’s March?”
“Three pushes. Ninety.”
She wrote it out for three hundred and held it across to him.
He looked at the check and then at me.
“She’s the owner,” I said. “You can argue with her.”
He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, under the coat.
“Your mother,” he said to Michelle, “was nobody’s fool.”
“So I’m told,” my sister said.
We sold it together. That was Michelle’s word, together, and she held to it.