Rosettes on the Church Steps

Sold out

The last dozen went at five minutes to eleven, to a man from Cresco who had driven over for the fall walk with his grandson.

The boy picked out the rosettes himself, one at a time, and made me promise they were all the same size.

Mom wrote it in her notebook. Then she closed the notebook and closed the blue cash box and sat with both hands on the lid of the box, with the sun on her face and the maple leaves coming down on the steps around her.

“Four hundred dollars,” she said. “Forty dozen. And I made forty dollars change, and I have forty dollars change left over.”

“You did it, Mom.”

“We did it,” she said. She looked at Marit, on her other side. “All of us.”

Arne came and carried the card table and the folding chair back to the car. Marit stacked the empty trays. I folded the tablecloth.

And Mom walked to the car on my arm, in her cranberry red coat, with Dad’s cash box under her other arm.

The mailbox

Mom found the envelope at about three o’clock that afternoon, when she went out to get the mail.

It was a white business envelope with no stamp, folded once, stuck in the mailbox under the electric bill.

She called me. I drove over. She was sitting at the kitchen table with the envelope open in front of her and the bills spread out on the oilcloth.

Six hundred forty dollars. All in twenties. Thirty-two of them.

There was a note inside, on a piece of paper torn from a small spiral pad. It said, in Gordy’s handwriting, “Inga, I found it. I’m sorry. G.”

Mom looked at the note for a long time. Then she looked at the twenties. Then she looked at me over her glasses.

“He didn’t find it,” she said.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

“My money was in fives and tens and ones,” she said. “I counted it myself before I gave it to him. There wasn’t a twenty in that envelope. Not one.”

“I know, Mom.”

She folded the note in half and put it in the pocket of her cardigan. She did not tear it up.

She did not throw it away. She just put it in her pocket, the way you keep something you are not done thinking about.

“Well,” she said. “He brought it back. That’s something.”