The Casino Sign My Mother Read

“Mama.”

“Eight thousand dollars, Dana, for eyes. I’m not spending eight thousand dollars on eyes. Your daddy’s whole funeral wasn’t that. I’ll manage.”

And here is the part that will tell you everything about my mother. She would not let me pay it. I offered the first week. I offered the second month. I offered at Christmas and I offered on her birthday, and every single time she got a look on her face like I had tried to hand her money on the street.

“You worked for that land,” she said once, the exact phrase, the one Greg threw in the trash. “You did not work for it so you could buy your mother a pair of eyes. I had my eyes sixty-six years. Some people never get good ones at all.”

So that is the answer to the question I know you are asking, the one my practical cousin Sharon would ask first: why didn’t you just pay for your mother’s surgery two years ago and save everybody the trouble.

Because she would not take it. You cannot make a proud woman take a thing. You can only wait until the day comes when you can put it somewhere she cannot give it back.

The next October

That day came the next October.

A whole year passed. I will not pretend it was a good year. Greg said sorry the way he always said sorry, big and wet and specific for about four days and then gone. He did not gamble again that I knew of, or he did it small enough that I did not catch it. We went to counseling twice and he said the man did not understand him.

I stopped keeping the forty acres a thing we talked about. I had learned my lesson about his name being near it.

I went down to the courthouse in the spring, quiet, and I had the lease arrangement changed so the annual check would come to a post office box only I had the key to, in my name, the one account, the one I had kept since I was twenty-six. It is the only lawyer-type thing I did in this whole story and I am only telling you so you understand I made sure. I did not announce it. I just made sure.

Then I waited for October.

The check came the first week, like it always did. Eight thousand dollars. I was standing at the little counter in the post office when I opened it, and I did not take it home.

I drove it straight to the bank and deposited it, and the second it cleared, three days later, I called Dr. Reed’s office and I booked both eyes, the good lenses, and I paid the whole eight thousand dollars over the phone with my card while I sat in the hospital parking lot on my lunch break eating a sandwich I do not remember eating.

Then I called my mother.