The Bus Seat She Gave Back

Tammy slid the check across Mom’s kitchen table with two fingers, the way you pass a bill to someone at a restaurant when you are tired of waiting for them to reach for it.

“Four hundred dollars,” she said. “Every cent. The church office cut it Tuesday and I picked it up myself so it wouldn’t get lost.”

Mom did not touch it. She sat with both hands flat on the oilcloth, still wearing the good blue cardigan she had put on for the packing meeting, and her little brown suitcase stood by the door where she had set it that morning.

It was Wednesday evening, the last Wednesday of October. The bus to Iowa was leaving the church lot at six the next morning.

I had driven forty-five minutes from Hennessey because Mom had called me an hour earlier and said, in the thin careful voice she uses when something is badly wrong, “Donna, I think I need you to come over.”

She had walked into the packing meeting at First Baptist that afternoon, her cane in one hand and a sack of pecans for her sister in the other, and Bernice Fenske at the sign-in table had looked at her with so much pity that Mom knew before Bernice said a word.

“Irene, honey,” Bernice had said. “Tammy told us Monday you weren’t up to the trip. We gave your seat to Mr. Voight. I’m so sorry. I thought you knew.”

Mom had stood there in front of twenty-two people she had sat beside in the pews for thirty years. Then she had said, “Well, I guess I’m not going,” and she had walked back out to her car.

Now Tammy stood at the counter with her arms folded and her car keys still in her hand, and she looked at me like I was the one who had walked into the wrong kitchen.

“Donna, don’t,” she said before I had opened my mouth. “I did this for her. She is eighty years old. She takes a blood thinner. She fell in August and I found her.

You weren’t there. Six hundred miles on a bus with forty strangers and a bathroom the size of a closet? If she goes down somewhere in Missouri, who is going to be sitting next to her?”

“Mom,” I said. “Did anybody ask you?”

Mom looked at the check. “Tammy says that money is for when I need somebody to come in the house,” she said. “She says it is a good deal of money to spend on a bus ride.”

“It is your money.”

“It is,” Mom said. She said it like a woman reading a word off a sign in a language she used to know.

I want to be plain about one thing, because people ask. I did not yell. I did not tell Tammy what she was. My mother lives in the apartment over her garage, and Tammy is the one who walks across the yard at seven every morning and again at nine every night with the pills.

I live forty-five minutes away and work the scale house at the grain co-op through harvest, ten and eleven hours a day. If I burned that bridge in Mom’s kitchen, I would be driving over every morning at seven myself, and I knew I could not keep that up for a month.