Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
Then she went out to the carport alone. She was gone a long time.
When she came back in, her eyes were red and she didn’t have Ron’s keys anymore, except for one, the little brass tractor, which she’d taken off the ring.
She put it in the dish on her dresser where she kept her wedding band.
That night she made supper. First time all week. Pot roast with carrots and potatoes, the way Nate likes it, and a pan of cherry cobbler.
She set the table with the good plates.
Owen said grace. He’s four, so his grace was mostly about Biscuit and the train he’d seen go past the elevator.
Nobody corrected him. Linda had her eyes closed and her lips pressed together the whole time.
The tenth morning was a Monday. I was up with June at six, warming a bottle, when Linda came down the hall already dressed, her purse on her arm, her hair done.
She stood in the sewing room doorway where Nate was pulling on his boots for work.
“Nathan,” she said. “Call the elevator and tell them you’ll be an hour late. I need you to come to the bank with me when it opens.”
Nate looked at me. I shrugged. I didn’t know any more than he did.
He called in. His boss, Larry, said take what you need.
At nine o’clock Nate and Linda walked into Farmers State Bank together, and I know what happened inside because Pam told me later, and because Nate told me too.
Linda walked up to the counter and laid the cash down in front of Pam, the whole bundle, and said, “I’d like to deposit twenty-seven hundred dollars into my son’s checking account. It belongs there. I took it out two weeks ago and I shouldn’t have.”
Pam counted it. She wrote out the slip. And then Linda said, “And I’d like you to take my name off that account. Today. It’s his account and his wife’s. It hasn’t been mine for fifteen years.”
Pam said every owner on the account had to sign to take a name off, so she drew up the form, Linda signed it, Nate signed it, and Pam said I could stop by at lunch and sign my line.
And Linda sat in the chair right beside him at Pam’s desk while he did it.
Nate said she didn’t say a word while he filled it out. She just sat beside him with her purse in her lap and her hand on his arm.
When he signed his name at the bottom, she patted his arm twice, like she used to do when he was a little boy at the doctor’s office.
Then he called me from the parking lot. I was at work by then, standing in the daycare kitchen again, the same spot where I’d called Pam two weeks before.
“It’s back,” Nate said. “All of it. She sold Dad’s truck, Kait.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw.”
Then he said, “She told me why. In the car on the way there. All of it, the taxes, the house. She said she told you first.”
“She did. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t mine to tell.”
“No.” His voice was rough. “No, you were right. I’d have tried to fix it. And she’d have let me, and she’d have hated it.” He let out a long breath. “I’m going to go over there Saturday and look at her budget with her. Just look. She said I could.”
“That’s good, Nate.”