Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

“That was a gift, Bev,” my sister-in-law said, and she set her fork down beside her plate like the matter was closed. “You told me not to worry about it. I took you at your word.”

My mother sat across the table from her with a forkful of green beans halfway to her mouth.

She lowered it slowly. Nobody else at the table moved, not me, not my brother, not his two teenage boys.

It was Sunday dinner at Mom’s house, the same as every Sunday for thirty years.

Pot roast, green beans with bacon, the good rolls from the bakery in Wellington. Mom had asked her question so gently that I almost missed it.

All she had said was, “Tiffany, honey, I heard you got a hot tub. I thought that money was for the roof.”

That was it. No edge in her voice at all. She sounded like she was asking about the weather.

And Tiffany had looked her right in the eye and called eight thousand dollars a gift.

My name is Sherri Lindquist. I am forty-five years old, and I have been a pharmacy tech at the drugstore on Main for nineteen years.

I count pills for a living. I know exactly how much eight thousand dollars is.

For my mother, it was a third of everything Dad left her.

He farmed a quarter section and worked nights at the elevator for most of his life, and when he passed four years ago there was a small life insurance policy and not much else.

Mom lives on her Social Security check and that little bit of savings.

She keeps her house at sixty-six degrees in the winter and wears two sweaters instead of turning it up. She reuses tinfoil. She does not spend eight thousand dollars on anything.

But she had lent it. That was the part that made my stomach turn over at the table.

She had lent it because Tiffany asked, and because Tiffany was family, and because Mom has never once in her life said no to family.

The roof

It started in August, on one of those white-hot afternoons when the cicadas are so loud you can hear them through closed windows.

I had stopped by Mom’s after my shift to drop off her blood pressure refill.

Tiffany’s car was in the driveway. That was unusual. Tiffany came to Sunday dinner and to Christmas, and otherwise she mostly kept to herself. I never held that against her. Some people are just private.

She was sitting at Mom’s kitchen table with a cup of coffee she hadn’t touched.

Mom was across from her with the checkbook open, the one with the brown vinyl cover that Dad bought her at the Co-op in 1991.

“The hail got it, Bev,” Tiffany was saying when I came in.

“That storm in June. The adjuster came out and said it wasn’t bad enough to total, so insurance won’t pay for a new one, and it’s leaking over the boys’ room.”

“We need a new roof before winter,” Tiffany said. “Eight thousand would cover it. I would not ask if I had anywhere else to go. Mark doesn’t know I’m here. He’d be too proud.”

Mom looked at me over her reading glasses. I want to be honest about this part: I said nothing.

I could have said, why not a bank, why not ask Mark. I didn’t. It was not my money and it was not my business.

Mom wrote the check right there, in her careful Palmer handwriting. Eight thousand and no cents. In the memo line she wrote “roof.”

She tore it out along the perforation and folded it once before she handed it across the table.

“You pay me back when you can, honey,” Mom said. “Don’t you worry about it. Get those boys a dry room before the snow.”

Tiffany hugged her. It was a stiff hug, the kind you give when your back hurts or when you are ashamed of something, and at the time I had no idea which it was. She thanked Mom twice and left without finishing the coffee.