The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

Debra

Debra came to Mom’s house on the Thursday. I was there. I had stopped after my afternoon route, and I was standing at the stove when I saw her car pull up.

She didn’t come to the front door. She came around to the back, to the new railing, and she knocked on the kitchen door like a neighbor.

Mom said, “Let her in, Karen.”

Debra stood in Mom’s kitchen with her coat still on. She looked older than she had a week before. She looked at me first, and then she looked at the floor, and then she made herself look at Mom.

“Gary’s hours got cut in November,” she said. “Down to twenty-eight a week. Then the weekend crew in March. We were three payments behind on the house. They sent a letter. The kind of letter they send before they send the next kind.”

Mom didn’t say anything. She just let her talk.

“And then you fell,” Debra said, “and you were going to need somebody anyway, and I thought, I’ll take care of her. I’ll do her laundry and her meals and her pills. I’ll earn it. That’s what I told myself. I was earning it.”

“You told the church I was too frail for visitors,” Mom said.

Debra’s face went red, all the way down her neck.

“If they’d come,” she said, “you’d have told them about the card. Or you’d have asked where Karen was. And then they’d have known. Everybody would have known Gary and I couldn’t make our house payment. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand for this whole town to know.”

“So you told me Karen was too busy for me.”

Debra started crying then. Not loud. She put her hand over her mouth.

“I couldn’t have you going with her,” she said. “If you went with her, the check went with you. And Karen has always been the good one. I didn’t want you looking at her the way you were going to look at me.”

What Mom decided

My mother sat at her own kitchen table with her hands folded on the oilcloth for a long time. The clock over the stove was the one Dad won at the county fair in 1971, and I could hear it.

“You’ll pay it back,” Mom said. “Every dollar you took that didn’t go to my groceries and my pills. You figure it honestly, and you bring me the number, and Karen will check it.”

“Mom, I can’t right now. I don’t have it.”

“I know you don’t. You’ll pay me fifty dollars a month until it’s done. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m not in a hurry, I’m going to live a long time.”

Debra nodded. She couldn’t talk.

“And you’ll go to Pastor Ellen,” Mom said, “yourself, and tell her the truth about why you said I was frail. Not the whole church. Just Ellen. She deserves to know, and she’ll keep it.”

“All right.”

“And Debra.”

My sister looked up.

“Next time you’re in trouble,” Mom said, “you sit right there in that chair and you tell me. That’s what that chair is for. Your father sat in that chair and told me we were going to lose the farm in 1985, and we didn’t lose it, because he told me. You hear?”

Debra nodded again. Then she got up and went out the back door and down the steps, holding on to Tom’s new railing, and drove away.

I thought Mom would cry after she left. She didn’t. She got up and made us both a cup of instant coffee and sat back down.

“That girl has been ashamed of something her whole life,” Mom said. “I never could find out what. I guess now I know some of it.”