The Pension Check Mom Cashed Herself

“Mom. Your heart pill is forty-seven dollars.”

“Well, it’s not usually due the same week as the beauty shop.” She tried to laugh. “I just got my weeks crossed.”

I wanted to say a dozen things right there on that sidewalk. I said none of them. I kissed her on the cheek, told her I would call her that evening, and went back inside to finish ringing up the man from the feed store.

He paid for his allergy tablets and did not say a word about what he had seen. On his way out he held the door for an older couple coming in and told them to have a blessed day. I have always liked him for that.

On my lunch break I sat in my car behind the store with a sandwich I did not eat and a pen and the back of a receipt, and I did the math.

Eleven hundred and forty dollars a month is thirteen thousand six hundred and eighty dollars a year. Forty dollars a week is two thousand and eighty a year. The difference is eleven thousand six hundred dollars a year.

Three years of that came to thirty-four thousand eight hundred dollars.

I looked at that number for a long time. Then I folded the receipt in half and put it in my vest pocket, and I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel until it was time to go back in.

I want to be fair about Harlan, because my mother would want me to be.

He married her fifteen years ago, four years after my dad passed. He drove a truck for forty years, mostly grain and then later freight out of Kansas City, and he was a hard worker.

He fixed her gutters. He sat with her at church. When my boys were small he taught them both to change a tire in his driveway.

He was never cruel to her where I could see it. He was a quiet man, a little stiff, the kind who reads the paper at the table and says grace in six words. I did not love him, but I did not have a reason not to.

The one thing that had changed was the Fridays.

After he quit driving six years ago, he started going to the casino boat over at Boonville. At first it was once a month with a couple of other retired drivers, a buffet and a few hours at the machines.

Then it was every other Friday. By last spring it was every Friday, and Mom had stopped mentioning it.

I had noticed. I had told myself it was his money and his business.

It was not his money.

That evening I told my husband everything at the kitchen table. He works for the county road crew and he is not a man of many words, but he listened to the whole thing with his coffee going cold in front of him.

“You want me to go out there?” he said when I finished. “I’ll go out there right now.”

“No,” I said. “That’s the thing. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”

He waited.

“If you go out there, or I go out there, and we have it out with him, it feels good for about an hour,” I said. “Then we drive home. And Mom is the one left in that house with him, all night and all the next day and every day after.”