The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

By ten o’clock Roy had settled up with me in cash on the porch, forty-three hundred dollars. I put it in my purse and drove to Casey’s, because I could not stand to watch. I knew I was selling the rest anyway. I could not watch it go.

When I got back, my sister’s truck was in the driveway and the whole yard had gone quiet. I found her in the kitchen holding the lid of the empty Folgers can, which I had set back on the shelf so the shelf would not look wrong.

I walked in with my Casey’s cup like I’d come to ask whether she wanted one.

“Before you start,” I said, “it was a lot of stuff, Wanda. Mom’s not coming back to this house. She doesn’t need a table for twelve in a room with a bed.”

“The can,” she said.

“I took the can. And the sale came to forty-three hundred. I’ve got bills. I’ll get it sorted out.”

My voice came out calm as church, and my hands were shaking so hard I held the cup against my ribs. She asked how I could do that to Mom.

I shrugged. And I heard myself say it.

“She won’t know the difference. She’ll be in a bed that comes with the building. It’s furniture, Wanda. Nobody’s going to miss a chair.”

I was afraid, and that is not a reason. I needed my mother not to notice, so I said she wouldn’t, to her own daughter, in a voice I had practiced in the car. Fear explains that sentence. It does not excuse it.

Roy stood in the kitchen doorway. He heard every word. He looked at his boots.

Wanda did not yell. She looked at me for a full minute and said, “Somebody will, Gail.”

Then she walked out on the porch and told the yard, loud and level, “Roy, nothing else leaves this place. My mother is alive, and she never said sell.”

Through the kitchen window I watched half the trucks along the ditch set things back down on the grass.

Now the worst thing in this story, because the point of telling it is not to leave the worst thing out. I drove to the bank in Marlow and fed forty-three hundred dollars of my mother’s furniture money into the ATM, and the machine thanked me.

My sister had just told me somebody would miss a chair. I made the deposit anyway.