Mom’s Ninetieth at the Front Window

The photograph on the wall

The photograph of Mom at nineteen does not sit in a closet anymore.

Raymond had a copy made at the drugstore in Beatrice and gave Mom the original. Then he hung the copy on the wall beside the front window, right above the table where she sat for her ninetieth.

Mom goes in every Thursday now after pinochle with the card club. They sit at that table under her picture and drink coffee and argue about who reneged.

Mom always pours the first cup.

Raymond leaves the pot by her hand. He says it’s tradition now. He says his mother would have wanted it that way.

I asked Mom once, not long ago, whether she was still angry about the tin. Whether some part of her still minded that her two years went into a dress she never even saw Brooklyn wear.

She thought about it. She was sitting at her own kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in the sunshine, with the tin on top of the refrigerator behind her, already heavy again.

“No,” she said. “I got my table. I got my coffee pot. I got my granddaughter back. And I got to find out who she was going to be.”

She took a sip of her coffee.

“Ninety years old,” she said, “and I’m still learning that you can’t always pick the price of a thing. But you can pick what you do once it’s paid.”

I wrote that one down on the back of an extension office envelope, and it is stuck to my refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an ear of corn.

The last thing

I keep one more thing, and I will tell you what it is and then I will be done.

It is one of those nine little candles. Raymond saved them in a paper napkin after the cake was cut and handed them to me on the way out.

“Billie’s,” he said. “Somebody ought to have them.”

I gave seven of them away that afternoon. One to each of the card club ladies, one to my brother, one to Brooklyn, and one to Mom.

The eighth one I gave to Tiffani. I did not plan to. She was standing by her car in the cafe parking lot in the afternoon sun, and she looked so tired, and I just held it out to her.

She looked at it a long time. Then she took it and put it in her coat pocket, and she said thank you, and we did not say anything else.

The ninth one is in my jewelry box, wrapped in that paper napkin.

Ninety candles would not fit on that little cake. So Raymond lit nine. And on a bright Saturday in November, at a long table by the front window of a cafe on Main Street, every one of them burned exactly as long as it needed to.