The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

Four Hundred Dollars

The first payment was due in July, and I put it off to the last possible day.

Mom had said in person, so there was no mailing it. The only place to find Wanda alone was the bus barn behind the Hollis Grove football field, after her afternoon route. I stood in the gravel at ten after four in my good blouse. That morning Mom had taken the envelope out of her dresser drawer, where it had sat since May. “It goes to Wanda,” she said. “You carry it.”

The bus pulled in. Wanda came down the steps with her thermos under one arm, and she saw me and stopped.

“The two thousand from Mom’s room,” I said, “and four hundred for July. All of it goes to your roof.”

“Count it.”

I counted it right there in the gravel, twenties and a few tens Dale had pulled from his pocket. She watched every bill. Then she said, flatly, “Thank you,” put it in her shirt pocket, and climbed back on to check the seats.

That was July. I’d be lying if I said it was warm.

In August I brought four hundred again, and she took it and said, “You want a Pepsi?” We drank them on the bumper of her bus without talking, two grown women with a can apiece.

In September she said, “Mom says you’re quilting.”

“Badly.”

“Mom says you’re honest about it.” Wanda looked at her can. “I put your first money in a Folgers can on my top shelf. I don’t know why. It seemed like the right place.”

I said, “That’s a lot to ask of a coffee can.”

And my sister laughed. It was short and startled and rusty as a gate. I had not heard it in thirty years.

“Lyle Voss gave back that quilt for twelve dollars,” she said after a while. “He folded it like a flag, Gail.”

In October I told her about 1985, Edna Pruitt’s kitchen and the coffee can and Dad’s porch swing.

“Edna’s swing,” she said slowly. “I was twenty. I figured Dad built it because he liked her.”

“Mom wanted me to tell you.”

“No,” said Wanda. “Mom wanted you to know it.” Something in her face gave way, a little, the way ice gives on a pond in March, not all at once, just a long dark line. “She’s a tough old bird.”

“She is.”

Dale priced shingles in September and told Wanda, “Cost of materials and not a dime more.” She said she couldn’t ask him to. “You didn’t ask,” said Dale. “That’s the whole point.” He starts the tear-off this Saturday. I’ll be on the ground handing up bundles, and I expect to be rotten at it. The roof will be on before Thanksgiving.

Here is the number, because a story like this is no good if it hides the number. I have paid Wanda three thousand six hundred dollars, counting the two thousand in the envelope and four payments of four hundred. She has twenty-six hundred to go. I have not finished. Mom says the money was never the point, and I have stopped doing the math out loud.