The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

What a Town Knows

In a place the size of Hollis Grove a story does not travel. It is already everywhere, like weather.

I heard it first at Casey’s, on the Tuesday. Pat, who has rung me up for eleven years and asked after Dale’s knee every time, rang me up in silence. In a small town that is a verdict. I left the change in the tray.

That Wanda had gone straight to the rehab wing to tell Mom before somebody at Casey’s did. That Mom had asked only one question, and it was about the rocker. That Wanda had written Maple Court a check Monday morning for the sixty-two hundred, the deposit that held Room 14, out of the roof fund she’d been saving six years because the roof over her bathroom leaks.

Roy mailed me a note that week. He had not taken his commission, and he had refunded the buyers who set things back down, out of his own cash box. The note said: “Should have asked for the paper. R.T.” It lives in my kitchen drawer, where I’ll see it every time I reach for a spoon.

In my own head I added up what I owed, and the number was not sixty-two hundred. Mom said she didn’t want the table money. I wrote it down anyway: forty-three hundred more. I wrote it on the back of a clinic invoice and folded it into my wallet, and it is still there.

Dale found out the way everyone did, from Casey’s. He sat on the tailgate of his truck in the driveway and said nothing for a long time. Then: “How much is on the card, Gail?”

I had never told him the number. I told him then.

He did not look at me for two days. I don’t blame him. On the third day he drove to the co-op and took a job hauling feed for two-thirds of what he used to make. He came home at six with feed dust in his hair and said, “I’m not going to sit home and let you carry this alone.” And then, quieter: “You should have told me.”

“I know.”

“You should have told all of us.”

Room 14

The second Saturday of May was moving day at Maple Court, and I could not have stayed home if you’d chained me to the stove.

I parked at the back of the lot. I could see Room 14 from there: a window onto a lilac bush in bloom, and in front of it the shape of a chair. I sat in that car for an hour with an envelope in the glove compartment. Two thousand dollars, all that was left of the can. For three weeks I had meant to mail it, and mail would have let me off.

An aide in teal scrubs came out on her break. She walked past my car, stopped, and came back.

“You’re Neva’s other daughter,” she said through the glass.

I rolled the window down. “I’m the one who sold her furniture.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Tonya, not unkind. “I figured.” She looked at the building. “She eats at noon and naps at two. I’d say one o’clock is your window.”