The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

January

I married Dale Soames when I was twenty-two. He was a big, easy, slow-talking man who drove for a freight outfit out of the Marlow terminal, and he took one look at me planning our wedding dinner on a napkin and said, “Whatever you think, Gail.” That was the whole marriage, really. I thought, and Dale agreed, and it worked for thirty-four years.

I kept the books. I still do, part time, at the Marlow Veterinary Clinic, where I can tell you to the penny what everyone’s spayed cat cost them. At home I kept our books too, and here is the thing about being the one who keeps the books: nobody checks your work. Why would they? I was the quick one.

In January the freight company closed the Marlow terminal. Dale was fifty-eight. He came home at two in the afternoon with his lunch cooler and stood in the kitchen like a man in somebody else’s house.

I told him we would be fine. I had a plan.

The plan was that I would cover it. A little on the credit card, groceries and the electric, until his unemployment started. Then it started and it was half of what he’d made, and the mortgage was exactly what I knew it was, and I had stopped looking at it. I paid January. I missed February. I missed March. Each time I put a little more on the card and called it a bridge, and by April the bridge was eleven thousand dollars long.

There were ways out, and I did not take them. I called the mortgage company once, got a recorded menu and a promise that someone would be in touch, and hung up before anyone could say the word forbearance. Dale’s severance had gone to the truck note. His folks live out of state, and his mother counts every dollar she ever lent, so that door stayed shut. Dale put in applications all winter and kept hearing “we’ll call you.” And every afternoon I got to the mailbox before he did.

I told nobody. Not Dale, not our grown kids, Megan and Tyler, not Wanda, who would have handed me her checkbook with a face like a funeral. And not Mom.

I told myself I was protecting them. I was protecting the quick one. For fifty-six years I was the one who landed on her feet, and I would sooner lie to everybody I loved than be seen drowning.

The Can

In March Mom fell off the back steps hauling birdseed, and Wanda called me from the bus lot at a quarter past seven in the morning, her voice gone flat with fright.

The county hospital did the hip. Then came the rehab wing, six weeks, and from that bed my mother became a general. She was eighty-six and five foot nothing and she was not going back to a house with steps. She wanted Maple Court in Marlow, where the dining room had cloth napkins and the Methodist women’s circle had already toured it and approved.

She also had the money, which I learned from Wanda. Dad’s Folgers can, top shelf of the pantry. Sixty-two hundred dollars she had put back a few bills at a time since the day he died. “For me to walk in with,” she told Wanda.

I said I would take the house. Pack the kitchen, sort the closets, sit on the furniture so nobody walked off with it. Mom said yes, and I remember her words: “Keep it safe, Gail.”