The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

Inside was a money order for two hundred dollars and a note on a sheet of lined paper. Mom showed it to me at her kitchen table.

It said, “Miss Edna, I am so sorry. I will pay all of it. I don’t expect you to forgive me. Tonya.” That was all. The handwriting shook on the last line.

Mom read it twice. Then she took her green spiral notebook out of the new purse, turned to a fresh page, and wrote at the top, in pencil, “Tonya, $6,600.”

Under it she wrote the date and “$200.” Then she drew a line under it, the way she has drawn lines under numbers since 1968.

The envelope has come every month since. Two hundred dollars, sometimes two hundred and fifty, once only a hundred with a note that said Kyle’s hours got cut.

I carry every one of them myself, from Tonya’s box to my mother’s, eleven miles down Rural Route 2. Mom gives each money order to me.

“That’s for your car,” she says, every time, and every time I try to argue, and every time she uses my middle name.

I have stopped arguing. There is a jar on my kitchen counter now, and when it gets to sixty-six hundred I am going to buy a used Jeep and drive it straight out to her house.

Mom wrote Tonya back once. I know because I carried that letter too, the other direction. I did not read it.

When I asked her what she said, she said, “I told her when it’s paid she can come out for coffee. Not before. But when it’s paid, she can come for coffee.” Then she changed the subject.

That is later, though. That is the part after. I want to end with the part I keep going back to, the part I will see when I am eighty myself, if I am lucky enough to get there.

It was almost five. The light through the Grange windows had gone gold and long across the wood floor. Most of the old folks had gone home, and the Methodist ladies were scraping roasters in the kitchen, and the band was packing up when the accordion player looked over at our table.

“One more for the birthday girl,” he called. “Edna, you got one more in you?”

Mom looked at Curt. Curt looked at me. I shrugged. My brother stood up, and he held out his hand to his mother, the way our father used to hold his out to her at every Grange dance from 1964 on, and she took it and stood up out of her chair.

She did not take the purse off her arm. I offered to hold it. She said, “No, honey. I’ll keep it.”

So she danced with it hanging from the crook of her elbow, the black leather swinging, with Dad’s picture tucked inside behind six thousand six hundred dollars that were hers again.

The band played the “Clarinet Polka.” Curt is not a dancer and never was, but he knew the steps because she taught them to him in the kitchen when he was twelve, and he went slow, and he did not step on her once.

The old men who were left clapped on the beat. Mark put his arm around me.

My mother danced the whole song. She was eighty years old, her white curls bouncing and her new black purse on her arm, going around and around the Grange hall floor with Curt to the polka band, laughing out loud all the way to the last note.