The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

So in March, Curt said Tonya might do it. She had been laid off from the plastics plant over in Marion and was picking up shifts where she could.

They had been together about two years. She was friendly, she was local, and she needed the money.

We agreed on three afternoons a week, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, a hundred dollars a visit. That came to about twelve hundred a month, and Curt and I split it down the middle.

I wrote my six hundred out every first of the month and put the check in an envelope in Mom’s box myself.

I liked Tonya fine at first. She laughed loud and she called my mother “Miss Edna,” which Mom pretended not to enjoy.

She took her to the eye doctor in Delaware and to get her hair done on Friday mornings when I could not. For a while I thought we had been lucky.

Then came that Sunday night in September. Mom called me at nine thirty, which she never does, because she goes to bed at nine sharp and has since the Carter administration.

She said, “Vicki, can you come out? Don’t bring Mark. Don’t call your brother.”

I drove out with my heart in my throat. I thought she had fallen. I thought she had found a lump.

I pulled in the lane and the kitchen light was on, and she was sitting at the table in her housecoat with her reading glasses on and that green spiral notebook open in front of her.

“Sit down,” she said. “I need you to look at something, and I need you not to say anything until I’m finished.”

Then she turned the notebook around and slid it across the oilcloth to me, and I saw my mother’s handwriting, small and slanted, row after row.

My mother kept the books at the elevator from 1968 to 1999. She did it in pencil, by hand, for years before they got a computer, and she could find a two cent mistake in a ledger the way some women can find a gray hair. She has kept her own money the same way her whole life.

Every Sunday night after supper, she takes the bank envelope out of her purse, counts the bills, and writes the total in the notebook.

She writes what she spent that week and what she took out of the bank. It always comes out even. In sixty years of Sunday nights, it has always come out even.

“In April it didn’t,” she said. “I was short a hundred and forty dollars. I thought I’d paid somebody and forgot. Then in May I was short three hundred. Then two hundred and twenty. Then a hundred. I went back over it and back over it, and it wasn’t the arithmetic.”

She took her glasses off and set them on the notebook. “Vicki, I thought I was losing my mind. I thought it was starting, like it did with Aunt Lois. I didn’t tell you because I was ashamed. I sat at this table at midnight adding it up four times.”

That was the part that broke me before I even understood the rest. My mother, who never forgot a birthday or a dollar, sitting alone in her kitchen at midnight, afraid she was slipping, too proud and too scared to tell her own daughter. I reached for her hand and she let me hold it.