Mom’s Ninetieth at the Front Window

What Tiffani said

I got the rest of it out of Mom over two cups of coffee and a plate of the date bars she keeps in the freezer for company.

Tiffani had come by on a Tuesday in April to drop off a casserole dish. Mom was in the bathroom. When she came out, Tiffani was standing in the kitchen with the tin under her arm.

“Brooklyn needs a dress,” Tiffani had said. “The one she wants is four hundred dollars at the shop in Lincoln. We’re short this month. I’ll pay it back.”

“That’s my birthday money,” Mom told her.

“Your birthday isn’t until November. You’ll have it back long before then. You don’t want her going to prom in something from the thrift store, do you?”

And Mom, who has never in her life told a grandchild no, did not tell her no. She did not tell her yes either. She just stood there in her house slippers while Tiffani carried her two years out the back door.

“Then summer came,” Mom said, “and nothing came with it.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Once. At the Fourth of July. She said things were tight and she’d get to it.” Mom turned her cup on the saucer. “Then I quit asking. It was starting to feel like begging.”

“Does my brother know?”

“I don’t believe so. He was on the road all spring.”

My brother drives a grain truck for a co-op out of Beatrice, and in planting and harvest he is gone before sunup and home after the late news. He is a quiet man and a hard worker, and he hands his checks to his wife and trusts her with the rest.

I know what you are thinking. Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and tell my brother, or drive over and tell Tiffani to pay it back by Friday?

I wanted to. I had my keys in my hand.

Mom put her hand on my wrist. Her hand is very thin now, all knuckles and a gold band she has never taken off.

“Corrine,” she said. “A birthday is no day for a family fight. I don’t want a fuss. I don’t want your brother and his wife not speaking at my table. I only want my table.”

“Mom, it’s your money.”

“It was my money. Now it’s a dress hanging in a closet. Nobody can wear a fight.”

I sat there a long time. The furnace kicked on. Outside her window, her neighbor was raking leaves into the ditch, and a combine went by slow on the highway headed for the last of somebody’s beans.

“Then you’ll have your table,” I said.

She squeezed my wrist. “I can’t pay for it now.”

“You paid for it already. You just paid early.”