The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

“So in June,” she said, “I started writing everything down. Every day. Not just Sundays. What was in the envelope in the morning, what was in it at night. What I bought at the IGA, with the receipt stapled in. Every dime the Hoffman boys paid me for the ground rent.”

She turned the pages for me. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, the evening count came up short. Sixty dollars. A hundred.

Two hundred. Never all of it, never enough that a woman who did not count would notice. Every other day of the week, the money matched to the penny.

“The week of the Fourth she went up to the lake with her sister,” Mom said. “Didn’t come at all that week. You remember, you came out on Thursday yourself.”

I remembered.

“Nothing missing that week, Vicki,” she said. “Not one dollar. I’m not slipping. I’m being robbed.”

She had added it all up at the bottom of the last page, in pencil, with a line under it.

April through September. Six thousand six hundred dollars. She had circled it once and then, I think, decided circling it was too much, because she had tried to erase the circle.

I am going to be honest. My first thought was not kind. My first thought was that I would drive straight to Tonya’s trailer that night and pull her out by that black hair.

My second thought was the sheriff. Our county sheriff’s deputy lives a mile from Mom. I have his number in my phone.

I said so. I said, “Mom, I’m calling Dave Pruitt right now. This is theft. This is elder abuse. They’ll arrest her for this.” I had my phone out. I was already scrolling.

My mother put her hand flat over my phone on the oilcloth. She did not grab it. She just covered it, the way she used to cover the plates when we kids reached for a second cookie. “No,” she said. “You are not.”

“Mom, she took six thousand dollars from you.”

“I know what she took. I’m the one who counted it.” She folded her hands. “I am eighty years old in three weeks, Vicki. I have lived in this township my whole life. I will not have my son’s girlfriend taken out of my house in handcuffs. I will not have it in the paper. I will not.”

“Then what do you want?”

She had thought about it. Of course she had. My mother does not call you at nine thirty without having thought about it.

“Two things,” she said. “I want somebody else coming out here after my birthday. And I want my money made whole. That’s all I want.”

“And Curt?”

That was the hardest part for her, I could see it. Curt is her only son. When Dad died, Curt was the one who sat with her in the machine shed until the ambulance came.

He is not a talker, my brother, but he is good, and she was afraid of what this would do to him.

“I’ll tell Curt myself,” she said. “He’s my son. It needs to come from me, not from you and not from some deputy. But not now. He’s working himself half to death at that elevator, and I am not going to have this sitting on top of his harvest. And I’m not going to have it spoil my party.”

I argued. I want that on the record. I told her Curt had a right to know who he was sleeping beside.

I told her Tonya would keep taking money for three more weeks. Mom said she had already moved the envelope to the pie safe on Tonya’s days, and there would be nothing to take.