Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

The sixth Saturday

The sixth Saturday was the last day of October. Halloween morning. The Harpers had a plastic skeleton sitting in a lawn chair on their deck, and somebody across the alley had pumpkins lined up on the back step.

It was cool and cloudy again, the same gray as that first morning. Steam poured off the water when I folded the cover back.

Mom put on her flowered cap, handed me her housecoat, and stepped down into her tub in her navy swimsuit.

She settled in and smiled and waved at the Harpers, and at the man with the beagle, and at nobody in particular. She was so happy.

I stood beside her in my teal jacket with my ponytail and the striped towel, and I thought, I could do this every Saturday for the rest of her life.

Then the sliding glass door opened.

This time she did not stop in the doorway. Tiffany stepped out onto the patio in her white robe and her slippers, and she walked toward us very slowly, the way you walk on ice. One hand was pressed flat against her lower back.

She had something in her other hand. An envelope from the bank.

She stopped at the edge of the tub, and she looked down at my mother in her flowered swim cap, and her face crumpled.

I had never seen Tiffany cry. I had known her twenty years and I had never seen it.

“Bev,” she said. “I owe you more than money.”

Mom sat up a little in the water. “All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

Tiffany held out the envelope. Her hand was shaking. “It’s eight thousand dollars,” she said.

“A cashier’s check. I took a loan against my 401(k) at work. It came through Thursday. I should have done it in August. I should have done a lot of things in August.”

Mom didn’t take it right away. She looked at Tiffany’s face for a long moment, and then she reached up with one wet hand and took the envelope by the very corner so it wouldn’t get soaked.

“Sherri,” she said, without looking at me. “Put that in your jacket pocket. Somewhere dry.”

I did. I zipped it in. My hands were shaking too.

Tiffany’s reason

“It wasn’t a gift,” Tiffany said. “I lied. I lied about the roof and then I lied about the gift, and I’ve hated myself every Saturday you’ve come.”

“Why’d you need it, honey?” Mom asked. “Tell me the real why.”

Tiffany laughed, but it was not a happy sound. She lowered herself onto the edge of the patio step with a little grunt, very carefully, the way people sit when sitting hurts.

“My back,” she said. “They fused two of the bones in my lower back last January, at the hospital in Wichita. The surgeon said it went fine. And it did, I guess. It’s just that it never stopped hurting.”

She told us the rest in pieces. The physical therapist had said warm water would help more than anything else.

Warm water takes the weight off, lets the muscles loosen. But the nearest therapy pool was in Wichita, forty-five minutes each way.

“I can’t sit in a car that long,” she said. “By the time I got there I’d be crying. And insurance stopped paying for the sessions after twelve visits anyway. It was forty dollars a time after that.”

“So you thought of a tub,” Mom said.

“I sat up one night at three in the morning looking at them on my phone,” Tiffany said.

“I could not sleep. I can’t sleep most nights. And I thought, if I had one of those in the backyard, maybe I could sleep. Maybe I could stand up straight.”

“Why didn’t you tell Mark?”

Tiffany wiped her face with the sleeve of the robe. “Because Mark worked doubles all last winter to cover my hospital bills, and he never complained once. And I’m supposed to be fine now. Everybody keeps telling me I’m fine now.”

She looked down at her slippers. “My mother used to tell me I was lazy every time I got sick as a kid. ‘Quit lying around.’ I guess I still hear it. A hot tub sounded like the laziest thing a woman could ask for.”

“So you asked for a roof,” I said.

She nodded without looking up. “A roof sounded respectable. A roof sounded like something a good wife would need. I told myself I’d pay you back by Christmas out of my checks, and nobody would ever have to know what it was really for.”

“And when I asked you about it at dinner,” Mom said gently.

“I panicked,” Tiffany said. “Everyone was looking at me. Mark was looking at me. And you had said not to worry about it, and I grabbed onto that like a rope. It was the worst thing I have ever done, Bev. To you, of all people.”