The Jar I Kept for Twenty Nine Years

The Jar

I should tell you about the jar.

I started it on a Saturday in the spring of 1997, the week after the lunch card, in my mother’s kitchen. It was a gallon pickle jar, the wide-mouth kind the Dutton Cafe threw out by the case. I washed it, peeled off the label with my thumbnails, tore a strip of masking tape from the junk drawer and wrote on it in blue ballpoint, in my best sixth-grade hand, two words. MRS. COLLIER. I pressed it flat on the lid. Then I went out and mowed a neighbor’s lawn for four dollars.

I mowed, I babysat, I sold mums from a wagon in the fall. When I was fourteen and the jar held four hundred and twelve dollars and some change, I took it to school in my backpack, and I stood in the door of the cafeteria kitchen after the last bell. Mrs. Collier looked up from the steel counter and said, “Hello, Marnie, honey, did you forget something?”

I said, “No, ma’am.”

I went home with the jar. I tried again at sixteen, and at eighteen, and at my own wedding, standing beside her in the receiving line with the jar in the trunk of the car. Every time I reached the door, I thought: she will say I don’t need that, and hold my hands, and never take it, and then I will owe her that too.

So I kept adding. I did not understand this until October. If I could not return a debt, I could at least make it bigger, so that when I finally brought it nobody could say I had not meant it. A twenty every Christmas. A fifty the year Cole was born. It has sat on the shelf over my washing machine for eleven years, behind the bleach, where no one looks.

In the bottom, in a sandwich bag, is a hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents, counted out at my mother’s table in the summer of 1997. Everything above that bag is what I added. Last Wednesday I counted it all on the kitchen table after my mother went to bed. It is one thousand six hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents.

I am not telling you the jar pays for anything. I know a sentence on a telephone is not a thing you can buy back. I am telling you because it is the whole of what I have, in twenty-nine years, to say thank you with. It is the only honest ledger I ever kept.

All Saints

On Sunday, the first of November, I woke before the alarm. The clocks had gone back overnight, and the house was gray and cold.

I took the children to church. I have sat in the back pew since the second of October, but that morning I walked up the aisle and sat two pews behind Velda Collier, in her gray coat, where she has sat for forty years.

It was All Saints. The pastor read the names of the people we had lost and said, “If there is a name you carry, say it aloud.” There was a hush, and then a murmur of names going up, one at a time. I heard Velda say, “Gaylord.” She says it every year. It is very quiet. It is the only sound she makes in the whole service.

I do not know why I did what I did. I said “Gaylord” too, just with my lips. I had not said a word to his wife in a month, and it was the closest I could get.

She turned her head and looked right at me, and then she turned back to the altar.

I drove my mother home and fixed her a sandwich. Then I took the jar down from the shelf over the washing machine and wrapped it in the blue dish towel with the yellow rooster that my mother gave me when I married. It weighs nineteen pounds. I set it on the passenger seat of the gray minivan and buckled the seat belt over it, and I do not know why. I sat in the driveway with my hands on the wheel for ten minutes.