The Money Orders That Kept Mom Home

Two boxes by the door

The sun was just coming up good and bright over the trees when I turned into the park. The lane was quiet. A few porch lights were still on from the night.

Mom’s door was shut. The notice was taped right at eye level on the outside, a plain sheet of paper with the company letterhead, held on by four strips of clear packing tape.

But that wasn’t what stopped me on the gravel.

Mom keeps three pots of red geraniums on her front steps from April until the first frost. She has done it at every house she ever lived in. Somebody gave her the first slips when I was a baby.

That morning, the pots were pushed back into the far corner of the porch, crowded up against the rail. The steps were bare and swept. She had cleared them so she could carry boxes down.

I went up those steps and opened the door, and there were two boxes already sitting just inside, taped shut. One said kitchen on the side in black marker. The letters were huge and crooked.

Mom was at the table in her robe with her coffee. She looked up at me and tried to smile, and her chin went.

“I didn’t want to be a burden to you,” she said. “I figured I’d start on it. I’m not a burden to anybody.”

I sat down across from her and took both her hands. They were cold.

“Mom, you are not going anywhere,” I said. “Not this week, not this month. I’m going to go pay it this morning.”

“You can’t pay that,” she said. “That’s your money. That’s Odell’s money.”

“Odell already said pay it.”

She looked down at the table. Her Bible was there by the sugar bowl, open, with her big magnifier lying across the page. She’d been reading, or trying to.

“I gave it to him,” she said. “Every month. I want you to know I gave it to him. I didn’t spend it on anything.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“No,” she said, and she got up from the table. “I want you to see.”

The little receipt book

She went to the drawer by the stove, the one where she keeps rubber bands and twist ties and the good scissors, and she came back with a little receipt book. The cheap kind from the dime store, with the carbon sheets.

My dad taught her that, years and years ago. He used to say get it in writing, Dee, even from family. Especially from family. She’d kept a receipt book in that drawer ever since.

She opened it on the table and slid her magnifier over to me.

Every month, in her big careful letters, she had written the same line. Gave Clint $525 for lot rent. The date. And beside it, every month, two letters in blue pen. C.F.

I turned the pages. January, February, March, April, May, all of them initialed. Then June. July. August. September. Initialed, every one.

He had stood at my mother’s table, or on her porch, and put his initials on the line, and then he’d driven past that office and put her rent in his own pocket.

Four times.

“Mom,” I said, “can I take a picture of these?”

“You can take the whole book,” she said. “But Jolene.” She put her hand on my wrist. “I don’t want a big fuss. His daddy was good to me. I don’t want the sheriff out here and everybody in the park watching from their windows.”

“No sheriff,” I said. “I promise.”

“And I don’t want you two screaming at each other.”

“I’m not going to scream at anybody, Mom.”

She studied my face with her bad eyes, the way she used to when I was fifteen and swore I’d been at a friend’s house.

“All right,” she said. “All right.”