The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

I got off early that Friday and came in through the side door with a bag from Glen’s in each hand and the cold still on my work fleece, and I stopped in the kitchen doorway because of what I saw in my own living room.

My mother was standing by the couch with her walker, in the light blue cardigan I had bought her for Christmas. She was counting folded twenties into my mother-in-law’s open hand, one bill at a time.

“Three hundred,” Mom said, very quietly, the way she used to count the collection at St. Mary’s. “Three-twenty. Three-forty.”

Marjorie stood with her palm out flat, in her red sweater, her silver perm set just that morning. She was not smiling and she was not frowning. She looked like a woman at a bank window, waiting for her change.

“Three-sixty,” Mom said. “Three-eighty. Four hundred.”

Marjorie closed her hand around the money and folded it once more. “Same time next month, Elaine,” she said. “And remember what I told you. No sense bothering Erin with it. She works hard enough.”

Then she turned toward the kitchen, and she saw me there with the groceries, and for one second neither of us moved at all.

I want to tell this honestly, because I have told it in my head a hundred different ways since that February afternoon, and in most of them I come off better than I did. The truth is I did not say a word. I walked past them both and put the milk in the refrigerator.

I put away the eggs, the bread, the bag of oranges Mom liked, and the box of Vernors I kept for her stomach. I folded the paper bags flat and slid them in beside the refrigerator where they go. My hands needed something to do.

When I turned around, Marjorie was gone up the six stairs toward her room. My mother was still standing by the couch, holding her walker with both hands, and she looked smaller than I had ever seen her look.

“Mom,” I said. “Come sit at the table with me.”

It took her a while. She was five weeks out from a new left hip, and she still moved like the floor might tip. I pulled out the chair with the arms on it, the one the physical therapist had told us to use, and I held the walker while she lowered herself down.

I want to explain how we got there, because it matters, and because the woman I was in that kitchen was not the woman I had been the week before.

My husband Jon drives long haul. He has for nineteen years, out of a terminal down near Grand Rapids, mostly dry van, mostly freight going to Texas and back or out to Pennsylvania. He is gone ten or twelve days at a stretch and home for three or four. That is our life, and we built it on purpose.

I work in patient billing at the hospital in Gaylord. I sit at a desk and untangle insurance claims all day, which means I know exactly what everything costs and exactly who is supposed to pay it. I mention that because it turned out to matter.

Six years ago, Jon’s father died of a heart attack in a deer blind outside Vanderbilt. Jon’s mother, Marjorie, sold their place because she could not keep up a woodstove and a quarter-mile driveway alone. She was sixty-eight then and had never written a check in her life.