The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

I went over the first Wednesday with boxes from the clinic and started in the kitchen like a good daughter. Then I opened the pantry.

The can sat where she’d said, behind the Karo syrup, a strip of masking tape on the side in her square handwriting: Neva, Maple Court.

I stood there maybe forty minutes. I did the arithmetic: two mortgage payments, the late fees, the insurance on Dale’s pickup. About four thousand two hundred dollars.

And I thought: I can put it back.

This is the lie, so I will say it plainly. I did not tell myself I was stealing. I told myself I was borrowing, and I had a repayment plan. The plan was that house, full of furniture a woman in one room with a bed would never use: a table that sat twelve, a china hutch, a davenport, Dad’s recliner. Sell what Mom did not need, and the money would go back in the can before anybody noticed.

That plan required my mother not to notice. I took the can home in a grocery sack.

Nobody’s Going to Miss a Chair

I called Roy Tilley that night. Roy runs the estate sales in three counties, and he knew my father forty years. He asked if Mom had said it was all right.

“She signed it all over to me, Roy,” I said. “She wants it handled.”

A clean lie, one sentence long. He did not ask to see the paper, because I was a Prater, and Praters do not lie about such things. I used my father’s name like a crowbar.

I paid the two mortgage payments out of the can, and for the first time since January I slept. Wrong things feel so much like relief while you are doing them.

Meanwhile my mother was afraid, and I saw it and kept going. She asked every nurse on the wing whether anybody had locked up the house. The Thursday before the sale she caught my wrist and asked, “Is my rocker still by the window?” I said, “Right where you left it.” That was true for two more days, and I chose the words for exactly that reason.

The sale was the third Saturday in April. By eight there was a line of pickups in the ditch. Roy said an oak rocker with that wear would bring ninety dollars, and the buyer was a young woman named Kayla Dunn with a newborn on her hip. She ran her hand down the runner the way Dad used to and put four twenties and a ten in my hand. The quilt went ten minutes later, to a farmer with a dog, for twelve dollars.