The Passbook in the Pink Purse

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything but my job.” She paused. Then she looked at me over her glasses, the way she used to look at us when we were kids running in the lobby. “But before you take that home, there’s something about Joanne you ought to know.”

“Jan,” I said. “You can’t tell me anything about her account.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I would never. This isn’t the bank talking. This is the women’s circle talking, and this is me, who sat next to her at Don’s funeral and held her hand through the whole thing.”

She glanced at the bench, then back at me.

“Since Don passed, she’s been selling things. Her quilts, at the flea market in the county seat. His tools. She sold his truck last spring and told everybody she couldn’t stand to see it in the drive. She’s been doing the church dinners for the leftovers. She’s not all right, honey, and she’s too proud to say so.”

I stood there with my hand on that little blue book.

“That doesn’t make what she did today right,” Jan said. “It wasn’t right, and you didn’t deserve it, and I’d have said the same thing you did. But you should know it before you decide what to do about her.”

I nodded. I could not say anything.

Maddie was standing on her tiptoes, trying to see the passbook. I turned it around for her and showed her the line. Deposit. Five hundred seven dollars.

“That’s all mine?” she said.

“That’s all yours,” Jan said. “Every penny. And your grandpa’s quarters are in there too.”

Maddie hugged the passbook to her chest next to the cards. Jan reached across the counter and straightened her tiara for her.

We walked out into the afternoon heat. Maddie got in the car and very carefully put the passbook in the little pink purse she had gotten for her birthday from her best friend, and zipped it, and then unzipped it again to look, and then zipped it.

Pete was home when we got back, sitting on the back steps with his elbows on his knees. The yard was spotless. He had even folded up the card table and put the folding chairs back in the shed.

I sat down on the step beside him.

“I went back over to Mom’s,” he said.

“I figured.”

“I told her she can’t come to this house until she apologizes,” he said. “To you. And to Maddie first. I told her that’s the rule, and I’m the one making it, not you. So she doesn’t have to wonder who to be mad at.”

I looked at him. Pete is not a man who makes rules for his mother. In ten years of marriage I had never once heard him tell her no about anything.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She didn’t say anything for a long time,” he said. “Then she cried. And then she told me some things.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Brooke, she’s broke. Flat broke. Has been since Dad died. The insurance barely covered the funeral and the stone. She’s been behind on the light bill since spring. She sold Dad’s truck.”

“I know,” I said. “Jan told me. Not as the bank. As a friend.”

“Tyler’s money,” he said. “Emma’s. All of it. It went to the light bill and the property taxes. She said she meant to pay it back. She said every time she kept something safe for one of the grandkids, she told herself it was a loan, and she’d put it back when things got better. They never got better.”