The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

Curt came back at a quarter after three. Alone. He came in the front door this time, and he walked straight across the hall to our table, and he pulled a folding chair up right beside Mom, on the other side from me, and sat down in it. He did not say a word.

Mom reached over without looking and put her hand on his knee. He put his hand over hers. And that is how they sat.

The band played “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Pennsylvania Polka” and “In Heaven There Is No Beer,” and Curt sat with his mother and held her hand and did not get up.

Much later, when people were starting to stack chairs, I sat with him on the steps out front while Mark loaded the tables.

The sun was going down behind the beans across the road, orange through the dust from somebody’s combine. He told me some of it then, not all.

He said Tonya cried in the truck. He said she told him the truth before he could even ask for it.

Her son Kyle had gotten behind on the payments for that blue Silverado, nine hundred and sixty dollars a month, and the finance company was about to come take it, and Kyle needed it to get to his job at the distribution center.

“She said she only meant to take it once,” Curt said. “One time, to make a payment. And then it was easy. She said she told herself an old woman out on a farm doesn’t need that much cash in her purse anyway. That’s what she said, Vicki. She sat in my truck and said that.”

He stared at his hands. “I asked her what she’d have done if Mom had needed it. If Mom had needed it for the doctor and it wasn’t there. She didn’t have an answer. She just cried.”

He was quiet a minute. “I don’t know what I am going to do about her. I’m not going to decide tonight.”

“You don’t have to decide tonight,” I said.

“I know it.” He turned his cap around in his hands. “The elevator slows down once the beans are in. I’m taking Thursdays. With Mom. I already told Ron.” Ron is his boss. “I’ll drive her to the doctor and do her groceries and fix whatever needs fixing. I should’ve been doing it from the start.”

“You were working.”

“So were you,” he said. “You still found the money. You still found the time.” He put his cap back on. “I’m taking Thursdays.”

He did, too. The first Thursday in November, he was at her house at noon with a sack of groceries and a new furnace filter.

He has been there every Thursday since. He sits at her kitchen table and they play euchre against the radio, and she lets him win once a week so he will keep coming back.

Jan Miller took Tuesdays and Saturdays. Mom likes her fine. She says Jan counts out her pills like a bank teller, which from my mother is the highest compliment there is.

And Tonya. I will tell you what I know, which is not everything, because Curt keeps some of it to himself and that is his right.

Two weeks after the party, I was running my route on a Tuesday, and there was an envelope in Tonya’s mailbox with the flag up.

It was addressed to Edna Sauer, in a careful hand, with a stamp in the corner. I took it out of her box the way I take everybody’s, and I carried it eleven miles to my mother’s.