The Plain Pine Box Mama Asked For
I went in and found her with her sleeves pushed up to the elbows, scrubbing a pan that was already clean. I took a towel off the hook and stood next to her. We washed and dried in silence for about ten minutes, the way we did when we were girls in Mama’s kitchen with the radio on.
“I called you cheap in front of Gordon Teague,” she said finally.
“You called me worse in the car, I expect.”
A laugh escaped her, a wet, startled one, and she put the back of her wrist against her mouth. “I did. I called you the whole alphabet.”
“I figured.”
She set the pan down in the rinse water. When she spoke again, it was without looking at me.
“I wasn’t there, Glenda.”
“Noreen.”
“I was in Omaha with my phone in the car. I was watching a volleyball game while Mama died.” Her shoulders began to shake. “And I came into that funeral home, and all I could think was, I have to fix it. I have to give her the best. The best casket, the best flowers, the best everything, so nobody can ever say we didn’t. I thought if I bought enough of it, it would make up for the one thing I couldn’t buy.”
I put the towel down and turned her around by the shoulders.
“She was not alone,” I said.
“I know.”
“No, listen. Listen to me. She woke up at the end. She looked right at the window and she said one word. You know what it was?”
My sister’s eyes were shut tight.
“It was your name,” I said. “It was the last thing she said. Not mine. Yours.”
Noreen folded up in my arms like a girl. I held on to her for a long time, and she held on to me, and somewhere behind us a pie plate rattled in a sink, and the radio in the kitchen was playing something low and sweet.
“She told me you’d want to do it fancy,” I said into her hair. “She said, she’s got a lot of love and not enough places to put it. She said to be patient.”
“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Noreen said, laughing and crying. “She was right.”
“She usually was.”
I told Noreen the rest on the drive back to my house. About the money.
Mama’s note said the money should go to the school. The difference between the pine and the Sovereign was four thousand three hundred and five dollars, and I had already phoned Beth Crandall, the school secretary, who had worked beside Mama in the lunchroom. Beth told me the district carried thirty-eight hundred and sixty dollars in unpaid lunch balances, some of it owed by families too embarrassed to send their children through the line.
“I’d like to give them all of it,” I told Noreen. “In Mama’s name. The balances and whatever is left over for the pantry.”
My sister was quiet for a moment. Then she opened her purse and took out an envelope.
It was a check, folded in thirds and written out in her strong, slanted hand. It was dated the previous Tuesday. It was for five thousand two hundred dollars. The payee was Teague Funeral Home.
“Gordon gave it back to me at the church door,” she said. “He said he had held it for me until I knew what to do with it. He said he thought I would.”