The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

What Mom said in the car

I took my hand off the key.

Mom looked straight out the windshield at Debra’s garage door. Her voice was even. It was the voice she used when she was reading the minutes at the Methodist Women.

“Every Sunday at nine, somebody knocked,” she said. “I could hear it from the basement. You can hear everything down there, the furnace, the water in the pipes, the front door. The first time, I asked Debra who it was, and she said it was the propane man.”

“On a Sunday?”

“That’s what I said. She said they come whenever they want out here. The next Sunday, she said it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses. After that, she didn’t say who it was, and I stopped asking, because I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed of what, Mom?”

She turned and looked at me then.

“Because every time I asked about you,” she said, “Debra told me you were too busy to come. She said you’d picked up the weekend trips, taking the girls’ basketball team to Wahoo and the wrestlers to Grand Island. She said you’d call when the season let up.”

I felt it in my stomach, the way you feel the bus drop when you hit a dip in the road too fast.

“And I believed her,” Mom said. “Because you do drive those trips. You drove them last winter.

“I thought, well, she’s got her own life, and I’m just an old woman who fell down. I didn’t want to be a bother. So I sat down there and did my crosswords, and I counted Sundays on the calendar Debra gave me from the feed store, and I didn’t ask for you.”

“Mom, I was here. Every Sunday. I was right there on that step.”

“I know that now.”

“How?”

She looked back at the house. The curtain in the front window had dropped.

“Gary,” she said.

Gary

I need to tell you about Gary, because nobody ever does.

Gary has worked at the meat plant in Columbus since he was nineteen. He is a quiet, broad man who has never in his life said a mean word about anybody in my hearing. He coaches peewee wrestling.

He brought Mom a pan of his own scalloped potatoes when Dad died and stood at her back door holding it and couldn’t think what to say, so he just said, “These are hot,” and handed them to her.

All winter, Gary worked Sunday mornings. The plant runs a weekend sanitation crew, and he had taken every extra shift they would give him. I had never once seen his pickup in that driveway on my Sundays.

But the week before, the plant had cut the weekend crew entirely. That Sunday, for the first time all winter, Gary was home.

“He came down the stairs at about ten to nine,” Mom said. “He had his coffee. He sat on the end of my bed, which he has never once done, and he didn’t say anything for a while. Then the knock came.”

She stopped. She smoothed the cover of the hymnal with her glove.

“And Gary said, Lois, that’s Karen. That’s been Karen every Sunday at nine since January. She brings your hymnal. I’m sorry. I should have told you weeks ago.”

I put my forehead down on the steering wheel.

“Then he went and got my coat out of the closet,” Mom said, “and held it for me, the way your father used to. And he opened the side door. And he said, Go on, Lois. She’s still out there.”

What Debra did

We did not go to church right away. We sat in that driveway with the engine running and the heater on high, and Mom told me the rest of it.

She knew about the debit card. Debra had told her the first week that she would “handle the money so Mom wouldn’t have to worry about it,” and Mom had let her, the way you let your grown daughter carry your groceries.

What she had not known was where it was going.

I opened my purse and handed her the bank statement. I had been carrying it for three weeks. She read it slowly, running her gloved finger down the lines, and when she got to the eleven hundred and forty dollars, she stopped.

“That’s their house payment,” she said.

“Yes.”

She folded the statement in half and then in half again and put it in her purse and snapped the purse shut.

“I’d have given it to her,” Mom said. She said it very quietly. “If she’d asked. If she’d sat at my kitchen table and said, Mom, we’re in trouble. I’d have given her the money. She knows that.”

“I don’t think she could ask,” I said.

I didn’t know yet how true that was.

Then Mom looked at the clock on my dashboard. It was nine forty.

“Well,” she said. “I am not going to miss the ninth one. Drive.”