The Pension Check Mom Cashed Herself

She tried on four pairs. I have never seen my mother take so long over anything.

She turned every shoe upside down, bent the sole, ran her thumb along the welt, and held the uppers up to the light from the window to check the stitching. The young man helping us did not know what to make of her.

“This one’s good,” she finally told him, handing him a pair of brown leather lace-ups with a soft crepe sole. “Somebody knew what they were doing on this one. Look at that seam. That’s a good straight seam.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She wore them out of the store. She carried the old pair, the ones with the knotted shoelace, in the box under her arm, and when we passed the trash can at the corner she stopped and looked at them for a second.

“No,” she said. “I’ll keep them. They did their work.”

She still has that crisp hundred. She has not spent it. It is folded in quarters in the little coin purse inside her pocketbook, and every so often I see her take it out and unfold it in the sun and look at it.

“Thirty years,” she told me once, smoothing it flat on her knee. “And this is the first one of them I ever held.”

I walked her back to her car behind the drugstore, and she drove home on her own in her new shoes, and I went back to my counter and counted pills for the rest of the afternoon and did not cry until I got out to my own car at six.

Then I cried for a while, and I called my husband, and he said, “Good. Come on home. I made chili.”

I did not hear from Harlan for a week. Mom said he was quiet. He slept late. He did not go to the boat on Friday. He ate his supper and said thank you for it, which she said he had not done in a long time.

On Thursday he drove out to the implement dealer on the highway and asked about driving parts two days a week, to pay his card debts with his own money.

On Sunday he sat in our pew at church. He did not hold the hymnal for her that week. He held his own, and he did not sing.

When the pastor asked for prayer requests, I saw him bow his head and keep it bowed for a long time after everybody else had looked up.

I do not know what he prayed for. I would like to think it was the right thing.

The next Tuesday afternoon, Mom told me later, he came in from the carport while she was shelling pecans at the kitchen table.

He stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands, the way he used to stand in our front room fifteen years ago, when he came courting.

“Willa,” he said. “I need to put gas in the truck.”

She looked up at him. She did not say anything about the boat, or the money, or the bank. She wiped her hands on her apron and went and got her pocketbook off the hook by the back door.

“That ought to get you there and back,” she said, and she opened her billfold.

She gave him twenty dollars, from her own purse.