The Envelope Under the Casserole Dish

People have asked me since why I didn’t just go over there that night and have it out with her. Why I didn’t tell her straight to her face that I never touched a dime.

Here is why. I had watched it happen to my own grandmother. When she started to lose things, she blamed whoever was closest.

And every time somebody argued with her, she dug in harder. Julie, I told myself, do not be the one who makes her do that.

You cannot argue a frightened woman out of being frightened. You can only make her feel cornered. And Evelyn, I was sure by then, was very frightened of something.

I could have called Pastor Ann. I thought about it. She comes down at the end of that Bible study most weeks to close in prayer, though she’d been at the hospital in Eau Claire that Tuesday.

She’d have been stuck between us, and I didn’t want to put her there before I knew what I knew.

So I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t make anything worse. I kept cooking.

Wednesday night I made a pot roast with carrots and potatoes and brought it over at a quarter to five.

Evelyn was sitting at her kitchen table in her blue cardigan with the television on in the other room.

“I brought supper,” I said, the same as always.

She didn’t say anything. She looked at the plate and then out the window at the bird feeder, where two chickadees were fighting over the sunflower seeds I’d bought her on Saturday.

I set it down and took the foil off. I put the fork next to it.

I said, “There’s more in the fridge for tomorrow’s lunch if you want it.” She ate without looking at me once.

Thursday I brought a hamburger hot dish and the change from her prescription pickup, eleven dollars and forty cents.

She took the bills and the coins and counted them on the table. Then she counted them again.

That one stung. I’ll be honest. I stood by her refrigerator with my coat still on and watched her count my honesty twice, and I had to look at the magnets on the door so I wouldn’t cry.

Friday she kept her purse on her lap the whole time I was in the house.

A big brown purse with a brass clasp. She held it with both hands like a woman on a bus.

Saturday I did her groceries the same as always. Milk, bread, eggs, the low-sodium soup she likes, prunes, birdseed, a box of Kleenex, and two cans of peaches. Sixty-three dollars and eighteen cents.

I put the receipt in the shoebox. I wrote the date on it. My hand shook a little doing it, which made me angry, so I wrote it again neater.

Sunday morning I went to church alone, the way I do whenever Mike is on the road.

I sat in our usual pew, fourth from the front on the pulpit side. Evelyn sat where she always sits, at the end by the aisle.

Two of the Bible study women always sit in our pew, too. Marlene and her sister Joan.

They have sat there for as long as I’ve been a Hagen. That Sunday they sat three rows back.