The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

“After my birthday,” she said. “I’ll tell him after my birthday, in my own way. You will let me do this one thing my way, Vicki Lynn.”

When my mother uses my middle name, the conversation is over. It has been over since 1985.

I drove home at midnight and sat in the driveway with the engine running. Mark came out in his sock feet and got in the passenger side.

I told him all of it. He was quiet a long time, which is how Mark is, and then he said, “Your mother’s right about the sheriff.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because it’s her money and her name,” he said. “And because if you call Dave, your brother finds out from a deputy at the elevator scale in front of thirty farmers. You want that for him?”

I did not. That was the end of the sheriff, and I have never been sorry.

But the money sat on me. My mother wanted her money made whole, and I knew Tonya did not have it.

If she had six thousand dollars she would not have been taking it in sixties and hundreds. Mom would wait years. Mom would wait for it forever and never say a word.

I had been saving for a new Jeep. Rural carriers drive their own vehicles, and the post office pays you an allowance for it, but it does not cover what a route does to a car.

I had about nine thousand dollars put back in our credit union account, and I had been looking at used ones since August.

I told Mark what I wanted to do. He did not even blink. “The Jeep’s got another year in it,” he said. “I’ll put new tires on it Saturday.” I married that man in 1999, and there are days I forget why, and then he says something like that.

On the Monday after, I took my lunch break at the credit union in town and withdrew six thousand six hundred dollars in fifties and twenties.

The teller, a girl I had delivered mail to since she was in diapers, raised her eyebrows. I told her it was for my mother’s birthday, which was true.

Buying the purse was harder than getting the money. My mother had carried the same one since Christmas of 1979, and I knew a new one would have to be something she would actually use.

The old purse was brown leather, a shoulder bag with a brass clasp, and Dad had bought it at Lazarus in Columbus.

He drove an hour each way on the twenty-second of December, in a snowstorm, because she had looked at it in the window that fall and said, “Well, that’s foolish,” and kept walking.

She had carried it for almost forty-seven years. She had the strap replaced twice at the shoe repair in Delaware, and when that man retired she sewed it herself.

The leather had gone soft as a glove and dark at the corners where her hands held it. It had been on the kitchen chair my entire life.

At the Kohl’s out by the highway I picked a black leather handbag with two short handles, the kind you carry on your arm, with a good clasp and an inside zipper pocket.

It cost eighty-nine dollars on sale. I stood at the register thinking it looked like nothing next to what Dad had given her, and I almost put it back.