The Last Checks Mom Handed Out at the Lake

The Bread

The automatic doors opened and Mom came out into the heat carrying one paper sack.

She walked to us across the lot and set the sack on the bumper of my car, and she took out a whole loaf of the good bread. Not the store brand. Not the half loaf off the day-old rack. The honey wheat from the bakery counter in the back, the kind still warm enough that the plastic bag had fogged.

Four dollars and twenty-nine cents. I know because the sticker was still on it.

“I haven’t bought one of these in two years,” Mom said. “I used to buy it every Saturday when you girls were little.”

She opened the bag right there in the parking lot, tore off the heel, and broke it in half. She handed one piece to Gwen and one to me, the way she did when we were small and squabbling in the back seat and she needed to make peace before we got home.

Then she tore off a piece for herself.

We stood there, the three of us, eating warm bread at the back of my car in the parking lot of a grocery store in Versailles, Missouri, on Labor Day. Nobody said a word for a while.

Gwen cried through the whole piece. Mom put her hand on Gwen’s back and left it there.

“I’m not mad at you, honey,” Mom said. “I’m done paying. That’s not the same thing as being mad.”

What Ken Did

Ken called the house in Tipton two days later. Mom put him on speaker on the porch, and I was there with her refill.

“Mavis,” he said, “I’m selling the boat lift. I’ve got a fellow from Sunrise Beach coming Saturday to look at it. It’s a good lift, it’ll bring seven or eight thousand. Gwen and I are paying you back. All of it. Every check.”

“Ken, you don’t have to,” Mom said.

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he said. “I’d want somebody to do it for my mother. And I’d want somebody to tell me if I was being a fool, and nobody did, so I’m telling myself.”

The fellow from Sunrise Beach bought the lift for seventy-eight hundred dollars. Ken took the boat out of the water for good and put it up for sale too, though that’s another story.

On the first of October, Gwen drove to Tipton and handed Mom a check for nine hundred sixty dollars on the porch steps. She has done it every month since, the first of the month, in person.

Twelve checks will make eleven thousand five hundred twenty dollars. That’s every dollar Mom mailed her, back where it came from. The September check from the picnic she never cashed. She tore it up in front of Mom that first day on the porch.

Gwen stays for coffee on the porch now. That part nobody asked her to do.