Mom was sitting on her front porch steps in Tipton with the grocery flyer across her knees and her good sewing scissors in her hand, cutting out a coupon for fifty cents off a loaf of store-brand bread.
It was the second Saturday in August, already ninety-one degrees at ten in the morning, and the cicadas in her silver maple were loud enough that she didn’t hear my car door until I was halfway up the walk.
She slid the flyer under her thigh like a kid hiding a note. My mother taught third grade for thirty-one years. She knows exactly what hiding something looks like, and she knows I know.
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“You’re early,” she said, and smiled at me the way she smiles at everyone, with her whole face, as if I were the best thing that had happened to her all week.
I sat down on the step beside her. The concrete was already warm through my jeans. I had come by with her refill, the way I do every month, because I’m the pharmacist at the drugstore on Highway 5 and she’s my favorite customer.
“Mom,” I said, “what are you cutting out?”
“Oh, just the bread one.” She waved her hand. “Fifty cents is fifty cents. Your grandmother used to say a coupon is money somebody dropped on the sidewalk.”
That would have been fine. Plenty of women her age clip coupons out of habit, and I would have let it go, except for what she had asked me at the counter three days before.
She had stood at my register with her purse held against her chest and asked, very quietly, whether she could cut her blood pressure pill in half and make the bottle last two months instead of one.
It was the extended-release kind. You cannot cut it. Cutting it dumps a whole day of medicine into your blood at once, and for a woman of seventy-six that is how you end up on a bathroom floor.
I had told her no, gently, and she had nodded and said she was only curious. I had lain awake that night doing arithmetic on my bedroom ceiling, because I knew her numbers better than she thought I did.
“Mom,” I said now, on the steps, “can I see your checkbook?”
She was quiet for a long moment. A pickup went by towing a bass boat, headed south toward the lake for the weekend, and we both watched it until it turned at the corner by the Methodist church.
Then she reached into the cardigan pocket of the old pale yellow sweater she wears even in August, because her arms get cold, and handed me the checkbook without a word.