The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

Ninety people came. I counted the chairs. The Grange hall sits at the crossroads two miles out of town, a white frame building with wood floors that have been waxed for every wedding and funeral dinner since 1912.

The ladies had covered the long tables with white paper and taped it at the corners. A three-piece polka band from up by Galion set up by the stage, because Mom asked for a polka band before she ever asked for a cake.

Tonya came at one, with Curt still at the elevator until two. She had a sheet cake from the Kroger bakery in Marysville on a board in her arms, white frosting with a piped border, “Happy 80th Edna” in script across the top.

She set it on the side table by the coffee urns and went to find a knife.

I watched her the whole time. I could not help it. She laughed with the Methodist women and she hugged people she barely knew, and when she came by our table she bent down and kissed my mother on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Miss Edna. You look like a million dollars.”

“Thank you, Tonya,” Mom said. She did not move away. She did not move toward her either. Her right hand rested flat on the black purse in her lap.

Tonya saw the purse. I watched her see it. Her eyes went to it and stayed there half a second too long, and then she straightened up and smiled at me. “Vicki, you need anything? Coffee?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

She went back to the cake table. Mom picked up the purse and hung it on her forearm, the way the Queen of England used to carry hers, and set her arm on the white paper tablecloth so the purse sat right there in plain sight. Then she turned to Mrs. Hoffman and asked about her hip.

That was how the afternoon went. People came by in a line to wish her happy birthday, and she held their hands and remembered their children’s names and their cows’ names, and the whole time the black purse sat on her arm. Every time Tonya walked past our table, Mom patted it, just once.

The first time, I do not think Tonya noticed. The second time, she slowed down. The third time, she was back at the cake table looking right at us when Mom patted the purse, and the knife stopped in the frosting and stayed there, not cutting.

She was looking at our table. Not at me. At Mom. And I saw something go across her face that I had not seen on it before, not in six months of her coming and going from my mother’s house.

It was not anger. I think it was fear, and under the fear, shame, which is worse.

Curt came in at a quarter after two. He had changed into a clean pair of jeans and a pressed shirt at the elevator, but his hands still had grain dust in the creases and he smelled like the dryers.

He hugged Mom from behind and kissed the top of her head and said, “Happy birthday, old woman.”

“Watch your mouth,” Mom said, and she held onto his wrist a second longer than she needed to.

He went to get a plate. I watched him stop at the cake table and put a hand on Tonya’s back, and she leaned into him for a second and then stepped away.