The Money Orders That Kept Mom Home

The office

Clint stood there with the book against his shirt. He looked like he might say something else. Then Avis stood up off the step and smoothed her folder shut.

“Clint,” she said. “I’m going to say this one time, in front of your stepmother, so there’s no confusion later.”

He looked at her.

“You don’t set foot in my office again,” Avis said. “Not to pay, not to ask, not to lean on my counter and tell me how hard things are. Dolores’s rent comes from Dolores or from Jolene. If I ever see you at my window with her name on your lips, I’ll tell the owners exactly where four months went, and I’ll show them her book.”

Clint opened his mouth.

“That’s not a threat,” Avis said. “That’s just how it’s going to be.”

He closed his mouth.

Merle didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. He just sat in that lawn chair with his ankles crossed and looked at Clint, the way an old man looks at a younger one who ought to know better. Clint couldn’t hold it.

He looked at me last.

I had been thinking all day about what I’d say to him. I had a whole list in the car. I didn’t say any of it.

“You know where I live,” I said. “When you have it, you bring it to me. Not to Mom. Not to Avis. To me.”

He nodded. He didn’t argue. He didn’t ask how much.

Then he walked back to his pickup, still holding the receipt book, and he sat in the cab for a long time before he started it. When he finally backed out, he went up the lane slow. He did not stop at the office.

Nobody on the porch said anything until the sound of his engine was gone out on the county road.

Then Merle let out a long breath. “Well,” he said.

“Well,” said Avis.

Mom sat back down on the top step between them. Her hands were shaking a little. I sat down on the step below her and leaned my back against her knees, the way I used to when I was little and she was shelling peas.

She put her hand on my head and left it there.

The geraniums

After a while Avis finished her tea and said she’d better go feed her dog. She hugged Mom, and then she hugged me, hard.

“Come by the window on the fifth,” she told Mom. “Just to say hello. You don’t have to pay a thing till then.”

Merle folded up his lawn chair and stood. “I’ll be right over there,” he told Mom. “If anybody comes up this lane you don’t want, you holler.”

“I will, Merle.”

“And you’re still getting my tomatoes,” he said. “What’s left of them.”

Then it was just the two of us on the porch with the sun going lower behind the trailers, everything gold.

Mom stood up. She went over to the corner of the porch where she’d shoved her red geraniums that morning, crowded together against the rail.

She bent down, slow, and picked up the first pot with both hands.

I got up to help her, and she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Let me.”

She carried it to the top step and set it down on the left side, right where it always goes. She turned it so the best blooms faced the lane.

Then she went back for the second pot, and set it on the middle step. Then the third, on the bottom step, by the gravel.

She stood back and looked at them. She had to lean in close to see them good, her nose almost in the leaves.

“There,” she said. “Now it looks like somebody lives here.”

I had to turn around and look at the elm across the lane for a minute, because I didn’t want her to see my face.

“Somebody does live here, Mom,” I said, when I could.

“I know it,” she said. “I know it.”