The Money Orders That Kept Mom Home

On the porch step

She wouldn’t look at it at the table. She wanted to look at it outside, in the good light, where she could read it herself.

So we went out on the porch. It was a bright fall afternoon by then, the sky that hard clean blue Oklahoma gets in October, and the elm across the lane was just starting to turn.

Mom stood on the wooden step, the top one, in her coral blouse and gray slacks. I handed her the receipt and she held it close, the paper nearly touching her nose, and moved it slowly side to side.

I watched her lips move. Lot number. Her name. June, July, August, September. Two thousand one hundred. Paid in full.

She read it twice. Then she lowered it and nodded once, a small, firm nod, the way she nods at the end of a prayer.

“All right,” she said. “Take it down.”

I reached up and took hold of the corner of that notice. The packing tape didn’t want to let go. I worked my thumbnail under it, and then I peeled it off her door in one long pull, slow, so it wouldn’t tear.

The paper came away in my hand with all four strips of tape still on it. There was a pale rectangle on the door where the sun hadn’t reached since morning.

Mom stood beside me on the step, holding up that money order receipt, and she didn’t say a word. Neither did I.

I folded the notice in half, then in half again, and put it in my back pocket.

Merle

Across the lane, Merle Toomey had come out to sit, the way he does every afternoon from about one until supper. He’s 79, a retired pipeline welder, and he and Mom have traded tomatoes and complaints about the heat for two summers.

He’d seen it all. He got up slow and came across the gravel with his hands in his pockets.

“Dolores,” he said. “Jolene.”

“Afternoon, Merle,” Mom said.

He looked at the bare door, and then at the receipt in Mom’s hand, and then at me.

“I saw the fella put that up this morning,” he said. “Early. I didn’t know what to do about it. I figured it wasn’t my business.”

“It’s all taken care of,” Mom said.

Merle nodded. He looked at the gravel for a while. Then he said something I wasn’t expecting.

“I’ve watched Clint drive past that office every first of the month since summer,” he said. “Right past it. Never stopped. Used to stop, back in the spring. Then he quit stopping.”

Mom closed her eyes.

“I sit right there,” Merle said, pointing his chin at his chair. “I see everybody come and go. I thought it was odd. I told myself maybe he was paying it some other way.” He shook his head. “I should have said something to you. That’s on me.”

“No, Merle,” Mom said. “That’s on him.”

Merle looked at the two boxes we could see through the open door. “You need help unpacking those?”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

“Well,” Merle said. “Is he coming by?”

“About four thirty.”

Merle took his hands out of his pockets. “Then I believe I’ll be over about four thirty too,” he said, and went back across the lane to his chair.