The Plate I Asked Her to Hang

How Donna Did Our Taxes

For eight years Donna did our taxes at that same kitchen table. It started when Scott and I married and I was twenty-five and scared of the forms.

She had done taxes for half the county out of her house for years. Cash jobs mostly, church folks and farm folks who trusted her more than they trusted the office in town.

She was good at it. She found us money we did not know we had, and she never charged us a cent. She said family does not charge family, and I believed her.

So every February I carried over the shoebox. Scott’s stubs from the lumberyard, my stubs from the clinic where I run the front desk, the mortgage interest, the little bit off our savings.

She would spread it all out under the good lamp and run her software and tell us what was coming. It was a thing I looked forward to, if you can believe that now.

She liked doing it. That was the thing.

“You two always get a nice one back,” she would say. “That is because you are honest and you are poor.” Then she would laugh so her whole chest shook, and I would laugh too.

I never once watched her type in the bank numbers. Why would I. She was Scott’s mother.

She had held his hand at his daddy’s heart surgery. She had kept my secret when I lost the first baby and could not say it out loud. A woman like that, you do not check behind her.

When the refund came, it came, and it was ours, and we spent it on something we had been putting off. The year the truck needed a transmission. The year my teeth needed the deep work I had been dreading.

Ordinary money for ordinary holes in an ordinary life. That was all it had ever been. I had no reason on this earth to think this February would be any different.

But this year we had plans for it. Real plans, the kind I had been afraid to let myself make.

I was eleven weeks along with our first. That came after three years of hoping and the one loss I still do not talk about to anybody but Scott and, God help me, Donna.

That refund was going to be the nursery. The crib, the little dresser, the paint, the glider I had been pricing at the place over in Cleveland.

Five thousand two hundred dollars. I had the whole room drawn out on the back of a light bill envelope, measured to the inch, the crib under the window where the morning sun came in.

I told Donna about the baby before I told my own mother. She cried and held my face in both her hands and said the Lord had finally answered. That is the part that still turns me inside out.