The Morning Mom Took Back Her Checkbook

She laughed a little. It was the first time she had laughed since I came in the door.

Around three o’clock she went down to the basement and came back up with one of the oldest notebooks, from 1972. She opened it on the table between us without saying anything.

The first half of the year was in my father’s handwriting. Big square block letters, the way he wrote on feed bills. Then partway through April, the handwriting changed. It became hers, small and slanted and careful.

“That was the week he turned it over to me,” she said. “He said, Marlys, you’re better at this than I am, and he was right. He never took it back, not once in forty-eight years. Not even when he was sick at the end.”

She ran her thumb over the place where his writing stopped and hers began. I watched her do it and I could not say anything at all. I just put my hand on her back and kept it there.

“You’re not confused, Mom,” I said finally. “You’re trusting. That’s different. That’s a whole different thing.”

She closed the notebook and held it against her chest for a while.

Sunday

We went to church Sunday morning because Mom would not hear of missing it. The roads had been cleared overnight, and the parking lot was mostly ice with sand thrown over it. I held her elbow all the way in.

The church treasurer is a retired dairy farmer named Dale who has counted the offering on Monday mornings for twenty years. He caught us in the narthex by the coat hooks before the service and leaned down to Mom.

“Marlys, I got the notice from the bank about your check,” he said quietly. “Now don’t you give it one more thought. It happens. You fix it when you can and that’s all there is to it.”

He meant it kindly. But Mom went pink to the ears. In all her years at that church, she had never had a check come back. She stood there in her good coat and could not look up at him.

“Thank you, Dale,” she said. “It’ll be fixed this week.”

During the sermon I watched her hands in her lap. She held her offering envelope the whole time, empty, because she had nothing in her checking to write a check from. When the plate came by, she passed it to me without putting anything in.

I had never in my life seen my mother pass the offering plate. I put a twenty in for both of us, and she squeezed my wrist.

Greg does not go to our church. He goes to the big Lutheran church in his own town with his wife. I did not know what my face would do if I saw him walk down the aisle.

That afternoon Mom took a nap, and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down, on the back of an envelope, exactly what we would do in the morning. I wanted her to do every part of it herself.

When she woke up I showed her. She read it twice. Then she nodded and said, “I want my good coat. The navy one. And I want to wear my brooch.”