The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

Thursdays

The first Thursday we talked about nothing. Mom rocked. I sat on the bed with my purse on my knees like a woman in a waiting room. After forty minutes she said, “Casey’s coffee tastes like a pencil. Bring the real kind.”

So the next week I brought a thermos of Folgers and two real cups from home, and Mom drank hers black and said it would do. By the third Thursday I was showing up fifteen minutes early, and I have never been early to anything in my life.

In June, on a Thursday so hot the lilac outside had given up, I finally said what I’d been carrying in my mouth. “Mom, I don’t know how I fix it. Wanda’s roof, and you, and the whole town.”

Mom set down her cup.

“Winter of 1985,” she said.

I thought she’d started on a recipe.

“Your father and I were a year from losing the place. You were fifteen. Interest rates had gone through the roof, the land was worth less than the note, and the banker had started coming by the house in a nice car.”

I remembered the car. I had not remembered what it meant.

“I was treasurer of the 4-H sewing club that year. We kept the pie-auction and bake-sale money in a coffee can in my sewing cabinet. Six hundred and forty dollars. I took it on a Tuesday and told myself it was a loan, and I’d put it back by spring.”

She was looking out at the lilac, steady as a post.

“I didn’t. I carried that four months, Gail. I taught that club at my own kitchen table every week and could not look at the can. Your father did not know. Wanda did not know. Not a soul on God’s earth but me.”

“What did you do?” My voice sounded like a child’s.

“I went to Edna Pruitt’s on a Sunday after church and set the empty can on her table and told her. Edna poured me a cup of coffee and said, ‘Neva, I wondered when you’d come.’ She’d known since February.”

“You paid it back?”

“Twenty dollars a month for thirty-two months. In person, at Edna’s kitchen table, every Thursday.” She looked at me. “You think I picked that for you out of nowhere? A check would have been easier. Edna talked about her gallbladder the whole first year while I sat there. It was the worst hour of my month, and the only thing that ever made me clean. The money is half of it. The other half is you have to show your face.”

“Mom, yours was club money. You paid it back. I took your lifeline, the money you saved to walk in with. It’s not the same, and I won’t have you make it the same.”

“I never said it was the same,” said my mother. “I said you’re not the first Prater to put her hand in the wrong can.”

I smiled, and it came out wet. She had given me company, not a pardon, and I knew the difference.

“Your father found the receipt book the next spring. He never said a word. He built Edna a porch swing that summer, white oak, and hung it himself. That was how he told me he was sorry I’d been alone in it.”

“Does Wanda know?”

“No. She was twenty and off with that Eilers boy. You can tell her when you’re ready. Not before.”

“How do you stand it?”

“You don’t stand it. You pay it.” She turned back to the window. “Hand me that scrap bag.”