The Jar I Kept for Twenty Nine Years

The Envelope

I asked her on the thirteenth of September, in the fellowship hall after church, between the coffee urn and the sheet cake. She said no, thank you, and she said it kindly. I said, “Think about it.” I asked again on the twentieth, and she said no again, a little plainer. I smiled and said, “Okay,” and my face stayed smiling for a minute after the rest of me had gone cold.

On Tuesday, the twenty-second, I wrote a note on a half sheet of paper. Seat 31. $160. Due Fri. 10/2. I put it in a plain business envelope, drove past her house at lunch and taped it to her screen door.

I told myself it was a joke between family. A joke leaves the other person room to laugh. I taped a bill to the front of her house like a notice from the county, for a woman who had already said no twice, and then I went back to the dental office and answered the telephone with a smile.

The Steps

I have to tell you about my mother, because the steps were my worst lie, and it did not even feel like a lie when I told it.

Bonita Coffey is sixty-six. She waited tables at the Dutton Cafe from 1982 until 2019, thirty-seven years, the last ten on a left hip that was bone on bone. She had it replaced last March, and she is doing very well. She walks to the mailbox without a cane.

When I started the Roadrunners, the first person I thought of was my mother. Then I did the arithmetic. She would be a hundred and sixty dollars, and I could not tell her I was paying it, because she has never taken a thing she could not pay for. And if I told her I was comping the seat, she would ask who covered the shortage, and she would read the whole green ledger in my face in about four seconds.

So I told the Circle my mother was not up to the bus steps. I said it in April in the church kitchen: “Mom would love to come, but she’s not good on stairs.” Everybody said, “Oh, bless her,” and the list moved on.

Six trips, April through September. Six Saturdays when my mother sat on her porch swing on Elm Street in a clean blouse she had put on at six in the morning in case I changed my mind.

I did not know she did that. A neighbor across Elm told me in October, when she saw me carrying in the groceries, and I had to set the bags down.