Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

What I knew and didn’t say

Tiffany fills her prescriptions at our pharmacy. Everybody in town does; we are the only drugstore for twenty miles.

I had seen her name come up in our queue every month since her surgery last winter, more than once a month for a while.

I never once opened her profile. I never looked at what she was taking. That is the law, and also it is just right.

Her medicine is her business, and if I lost my job over curiosity I would deserve to.

But I had seen her at the counter. I had seen how she stood, with one hand braced on the counter and her weight shifted off her left side.

I had seen her wince getting into her car in the parking lot. I had noticed, and I had not thought about it much.

I thought about it on the drive home from the third Saturday. I thought about it more than I wanted to.

Saturday four

The fourth Saturday, the wind was out of the north and the sky was the color of a nickel. Mom stayed in the full half hour anyway.

She said the cold air on her face and the hot water on everything else was the best feeling she had had in years.

Tiffany came back to the door that day. She stood there longer than before, in her white robe, and I noticed for the first time that she was not staring at Mom with anger. She was staring at the water.

It was the way a hungry person looks at a plate of food somebody else is eating.

When Mom waved at her, Tiffany lifted her hand halfway, like she was going to wave back, and then put it down and turned away from the glass.

“Did you see that?” Mom said to me quietly.

“I saw it.”

“She’s hurting,” Mom said. “I don’t know about what, but she is. I’ve seen that look on people. I saw it on your dad the last year.” She closed her eyes again. “We’ll keep coming.”

On the drive home I asked her straight out. “Mom, are you doing this to punish her?”

She took a long time to answer. Mom does not like to be accused of anything, and she likes it least when the accusation might be true.

She smoothed the flowered cap in her lap and looked out at the stubble fields.

“At first I was,” she said. “I’ll confess that. The first Saturday I wanted her to see me in there. I’m not proud of it.”

She folded her hands. “Now I think I just want her to come out.”