The Last Checks Mom Handed Out at the Lake

What I Wanted to Do

I wanted to call both of my sisters right there from the porch steps. I had my phone out. I had Gwen’s name on the screen.

I wanted to say twenty-three thousand dollars out loud into the phone and hear what she said back.

Mom put her hand over mine. Her fingers were cool, the way they always are, even in August.

“Don’t you call them,” she said. “This is my money, Tami. I’m the one who wrote those checks. Nobody held my hand and made me. If somebody is going to tell them it’s over, it’s going to be me.”

That stopped me cold, because she was right, and because I’m a pharmacist and I know the difference between a patient who needs you to take over and a patient who needs you to hand her the information and step back.

My mother was not confused. She was not failing. She had made a decision three years ago out of love and fear, and nobody had ever given her a clear look at what it was costing her. That part I could do.

“All right,” I said. “Then let me do the part I’m good at.”

The Legal Pad

I went out to my car and got the yellow legal pad I keep in the console, and I sat back down on the porch steps beside her, and for the next hour we did her budget together in the shade of that maple.

I wrote down every bill. She read me the amounts from memory, every one of them, to the dollar. I don’t know a single person under seventy who could do that.

When I subtracted it all, the number left for food, medicine, gas and everything else was two hundred and eleven dollars a month. That was why she was cutting coupons for bread. That was why she wanted to split a pill you cannot split.

Mom looked at the bottom of the page for a long time.

“Well,” she said finally, “I guess I’m not much of a math teacher.”

“You taught me long division,” I said. “I remember the chicken scratch you drew on the board with the little houses. You’re a fine math teacher. Nobody ever showed you the whole page, that’s all.”

She laughed, a short surprised laugh, and wiped her eyes with the cuff of that yellow cardigan.

Then she took the pen out of my hand and drew a line under the number, the way she used to underline the answer on a worksheet.

“The first of September,” she said. “That’s the last one.”