The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

“It still stands,” I said. “If she wants it to.”

Marjorie looked at me for a long moment. Then she got up, slowly, because she is seventy-four and her knees are not much better than my mother’s hip. She went up the stairs to her room, and we heard her dresser drawer open and close.

She came back with a white envelope, the kind from the bank, and she sat down at the table across from me, beside her son.

She took out four hundred dollars. Not the same twenties Mom had given her, I think, or maybe some of them were. She counted them out into my hand, one at a time, the same way. Twenty. Forty. Sixty. All the way to four hundred.

“That’s for March,” she said. “And I’d like to see the propane bill from now on, if you don’t mind. And the electric. I want to know what the house costs.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. And I meant it.

I put the four hundred in the cookie tin on top of the refrigerator, the one we use for the household money, and I wrote her name on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the lid. It is still there.

Jon went upstairs, took a shower, and came back down with his own pillow. He said a man who sleeps in a truck for twelve days does not complain about a couch. He slept there all three nights he was home, and I slept upstairs beside my mother, the way I used to when I was little and had a fever.

He did not mention the eight hundred dollars again, and neither did anyone else. I know my mother put it back in her account the next week, because she showed me the slip, proud as a schoolgirl with a report card.

Here is the part I did not expect.

The next morning, Saturday, I came down at seven to make coffee and found Marjorie already at the kitchen table with the paper and her crossword book. Mom came down the stairs at a quarter past, all six of them on her own, slow, with the walker waiting at the bottom where I had left it.

Marjorie looked up. She hesitated. Then she said, “Elaine. Six letters. A Swedish car.”

Mom sat down in the armchair at the table, the one the therapist told us to use. “Saab is four,” she said. “Volvo is five.”

“Six,” Marjorie said.

My mother thought about it. “Is it a car, or is it a truck?” she said. “Scania. Jon would know.”

Marjorie wrote it in. She did not say thank you, but she slid the book over a few inches so it sat between them on the table.

They did the crossword together every morning after that. Every single morning, for the last three weeks my mother was with us. Marjorie would have it open and the pencil sharpened by the time Mom came down the stairs, and Mom would have her coffee with too much sugar and argue about the clues.

Marjorie knew all the old movie stars and the Bible names. My mother knew the rivers and the presidents and every word for a bird. Between the two of them they almost never left a square empty, and when they got stuck, they would save it for me when I got home from work, and I almost never knew it either.