The Porch Money at Wednesday Supper

What my mother said

Mom knew more than I let on. She is old, but she is not deaf, and the floor register in her room carries every word said in my kitchen.

One night in September, after a hard rain, I went up to empty the ice cream pails. She was sitting up in bed with her reading glasses on her head, not reading.

“He’s hiding,” she said.

“He’s stealing, Mom.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But he’s hiding. I know what hiding looks like.”

I sat on the edge of her bed with the pail in my lap. I knew who she was talking about. She did not have to say his name.

My father, Walt, farmed a quarter section near Pine City until 1986. Those were the bad years. Land prices fell through the floor, interest was eighteen percent, and men who had done everything right lost everything anyway.

Dad did not tell anybody how bad it was. Not his banker, not his pastor, and not my mother. He stopped going to church. He stopped going to town. He started spending all day in the machine shed with the radio on.

When he died of a heart attack out there at fifty-four, Mom found the foreclosure letters in a Folgers can on the shelf above the workbench. Two years of them. He had never opened half.

“Your dad was not a crook,” Mom said. “He was ashamed. And shame made him do what a crook would do. He took what wasn’t his to take, which was the chance for any of us to help him.”

I did not know what to say to that.

“I’m not saying let him off,” she said. “I’m saying a man in a hole needs somebody to come stand at the edge of it. Not a lawyer. A face.”

Wednesday

Two days later, at the nursing home, I was helping a coworker, Kim, turn a resident on the long hall. Kim goes to our church too. She was telling me about the confirmation kids and how loud they get at Wednesday supper.

“The Lockwoods are there every week,” she said. “All five of them. Their oldest is in confirmation this year.”

I nearly dropped my end of the sheet.

I work evenings. I had not been to a Wednesday supper in four years. Brent could hide from my calls and my car and my Sunday service, but he could not hide from his own son’s confirmation class.

That night Darren called from a truck stop in Glendive, Montana. I told him what Kim said, and I told him what I wanted to do.

He was quiet for a long time. I could hear the reefer unit running behind him.

“You sure you don’t want me there?” he said.

“I’m sure. If you’re there, it’s two men. If it’s me and Mom, it’s just a question.”

“Take the contract,” he said. “And sit where he can see your mother.”

“That was the plan.”

“Heather,” he said. “Call me after. I don’t care what time.”

I traded my Wednesday shift with a girl who wanted a weekend off. Then I went upstairs and told Mom.

She did not say anything. She got up, went to her closet, and took out her good cardigan, the blue one with the pearl buttons she wears to funerals and Christmas Eve.

“I’ll want to look nice,” she said.