The Widow Across the Gravel Road

What my mother said

My mother did not say anything for a long time. Out in the barn Sam was laughing. A cat yowled. Owen hollered at Sam to quit.

Then Mom started to talk, and she did not look at me while she did it. She looked at the coffee cake.

“When your dad died,” she said, “I didn’t know anything. He did the books. He did the rent with the Hendricksons. He did all of it. Three years ago I had to sit down and figure out what we had, and it wasn’t much. It was the rent on the eighty acres and his Social Security.”

“Mom, you never said.”

“The rent went down,” she said, like she had not heard me. “Last year Jim Hendrickson came in and said with prices where they were, he couldn’t pay two-sixty an acre anymore. He offered two-thirty. I took it, because what was I going to do, rent it to somebody I didn’t know?

“That’s two thousand four hundred dollars a year gone. And the furnace went out in November, and that was another six thousand, and the car needed tires.”

I sat there. I had not known any of it.

“And Kyle’s kids needed somewhere to be,” she said. “And Brittany was so tired, and Kyle works so hard, and they can’t afford a thing. And I thought, Jenna has a good job. Jenna has always been the one who pays.”

She finally looked at me.

“You paid me back for that window when you were twelve,” she said. “Remember?

“You broke the window in the porch with a softball and I said it was twenty-two dollars, and you paid me back out of your babysitting money, a dollar at a time, for most of a summer. You never missed. You were the one I knew would pay. So I charged the one I knew would pay.”

Her voice broke on the last word.

“That’s the whole reason,” she said. “It isn’t a good one. I knew it wasn’t a good one when I tore off that first page. I just kept thinking it was only till I got caught up.”

The envelope

She reached into her purse and took out a long white envelope, the bank kind. It was thick. She put it on the oilcloth between the coffee cups and pushed it toward me with two fingers.

“I didn’t spend it,” she said. “Not one dollar. I meant to. I put it in the drawer every Friday and I meant to use it for the furnace bill and I couldn’t.”

“Every week I’d open that drawer and there’d be your money and I’d think about Owen asking if he had to pay me. He told me about that, you know. Back in March. He asked me if it was enough.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“Four thousand six hundred and eighty,” Mom said. “It’s all there. It’s yours.”

I looked at the envelope a long time. Arlene did not say anything. She just poured more coffee, slowly, like she had all day.

I thought about all the things I could have said. I had practiced some of them in the truck, at three in the morning, between patients. I could have told her what Owen’s face looked like on the shoulder of the blacktop. I could have told her what it felt like to watch my brother read those pages.

I did not say any of that. I pushed the envelope back across the oilcloth, gently, until it was in front of her again.

“I don’t want it back, Mom.”

“Jenna.”

“I want you to do two things with it,” I said. “Owen needs an expander for his top teeth. The orthodontist in Decorah says four thousand for the first part. I want you to take him. You. Every appointment. You sit in that waiting room with him and you take him for a malt after.”

Mom was crying now, without any sound.

“And the other thing?” she said.

“Fridays,” I said. “Come out here on Fridays. Not to my house. Here. Arlene says she’ll teach you rummy, too, if you don’t already know it.”

“I know rummy,” Mom said, wiping her eyes with a napkin. “I’ve known rummy since before Arlene Voss could hold her cards.”

“That’s a lie,” Arlene said, and for the first time all afternoon my mother laughed.