Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

The gift

That is how we ended up at Sunday dinner with Tiffany calling it a gift.

Mom had heard about the hot tub on her own, from the boys, and she asked the question in her soft way.

After Tiffany said the word gift, the room went still. My nephew Tyler, who is sixteen, looked down at his plate so hard I thought he would crack it.

His little brother Cody, fourteen, kept chewing because he did not know what else to do.

Mark put his napkin on the table. “Tiff,” he said, low. That was all. Just her name. She didn’t look at him.

Mom put her fork down. Then she did the thing she always does when she has been hurt, which is to smile and stand up and start clearing plates.

“Well,” she said. “Who wants pie? It’s apple. The Jonathans from the tree out back.”

Nobody wanted pie, but everybody took some.

I drove Mom home afterward. She lives eight miles out on the blacktop, in the same white farmhouse she has lived in since 1976.

She did not say one word the whole way, and when I pulled into her drive she sat there with her purse in her lap.

“I did say not to worry about it,” she finally said. “I did say that.”

“Mom, you meant don’t worry about paying it back fast. You didn’t mean keep it.”

“I know what I meant.” She looked out at the yard, at the clothesline Dad put up the year they married. “I just don’t know what she heard.”

That was my mother. Even then, she was trying to give Tiffany the benefit of the doubt.

Why I didn’t make the call

People have asked me since why I didn’t do the obvious thing. Why didn’t I call the sheriff?

Why didn’t I find a lawyer and send a letter? Why didn’t I march over to that ranch house and tell Tiffany exactly what I thought of her?

The answer is my mother. A handshake loan with no paper is a civil matter, not a crime, so the sheriff would have just told us to get a lawyer. And Mom would never, ever take her son’s wife to court.

“I will not make Mark choose between his wife and his mother,” she told me that night, standing at her kitchen sink.

“I will not put those boys through it. Eight thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it is not worth a family.”

So I stayed quiet. I went back to work on Monday and counted pills and tried not to think about my mother’s careful handwriting in the memo line. Roof.

The gate code

The text came to Mom’s phone on Wednesday night. She called me to read it out loud, because she has never fully trusted that she is reading her texts right.

“It’s from Mark,” she said. “It says, ‘Mom, the side gate code is 0412. It’s your money. Use it.’ And then a little picture of a key.” She paused. “What on earth does he mean by that?”

0412 was Dad’s birthday. April twelfth. I had to sit down on my couch.

My husband, Jeff, was in the recliner with the ballgame on. He looked over and I read him the text.

He started laughing so hard he had to put down his iced tea. “Your brother,” he said. “Your quiet brother.”

I called Mark at the elevator. He picked up on the first ring. “You’re serious?” I asked.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s her tub. She paid for it. I can’t give her the money back, but I can give her that. The cover clips undo on the side by the fence, and the controls are under the little flap. It stays at a hundred and two.”

“Tiffany is going to have a fit.”

“Tiffany,” my brother said, “can have whatever she wants to have.” Then, more quietly: “I already told her. She didn’t say anything. She knows she did wrong, Sher. She just can’t seem to say it.”