The Envelope I Left for My Mother

She looked smaller than I had ever seen her. Like somebody had let a little air out of her.

Jan poured three cups of coffee and sat down at the end, between us.

My mother wrapped both hands around her cup. “Kaitlyn,” she said. “I need to tell you that I’m…”

Jan put her hand flat on the table. Not hard. Just flat, the way you’d steady a wobbly table.

“Di,” she said. “Before you say one more word to her.”

My mother stopped.

“I think it’s time Kaitlyn heard about 1983,” Jan said.

My mother closed her eyes.

I looked from one of them to the other. “What happened in 1983?”

Jan took a long drink of coffee. She set the cup down very carefully in the ring it had already made on the vinyl.

“In 1983,” she said, “I was fifteen. Your mother was eleven. And it was a bad year. You’ve heard about the farm crisis, Kaitlyn. Interest rates through the roof, corn not worth hauling, families losing places that had been in the name for a hundred years. Grandpa almost lost ours.”

“Mom told me a little,” I said.

“Your grandma kept egg money,” Jan said. “You know what that is? Every farm wife had it. She sold eggs and a little cream to the locker in town, and she kept that money in a Folgers can on the top shelf of the pantry. It was the only money in the house that was hers. Not the farm’s. Hers.”

“She was saving for a sewing machine,” Jan said. “A Singer with the zigzag stitch, from the catalog. It cost three hundred and forty dollars. She had been saving for it for two years. She told us girls that when she got it, she was going to make our Easter dresses herself, instead of buying them off the rack in Marshall.”

My mother had her eyes open now. She was looking down at her coffee.

“That summer,” Jan said, “I took Dad’s pickup to a dance in Tracy without asking. Fifteen, no license. Backed it into a light pole in the parking lot of the Legion hall. Smashed the tailgate and the taillight.”

“Oh, Jan,” I said.

“I was so scared of Dad I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “He was already half out of his mind about the bank. So the next day I climbed up on the step stool in the pantry, and I took the Folgers can down, and I took three hundred and forty dollars out of it. All of it. Every dollar she had saved for two years.”

“I gave it to a man in Tracy who fixed the tailgate and the light that weekend and didn’t ask any questions,” Jan said. “Dad never knew. Not to the day he died.”

“And Grandma?” I said.

“Grandma knew,” Jan said. “She had to have known. Two days later she went up for that can to put the week’s egg money in, and it was empty. And she came down off that stool, and she put the empty can back on the shelf, and she started over.”

“She never said one word to me,” she said. “Not one. Not that week, not that year, not ever. She just started saving again. Five dollars, ten dollars. She never did get the Singer. Something always came up. The furnace. Your mother’s braces. My wedding. She sewed on the same old treadle machine until she died in 2009.”