The Bus Seat She Gave Back

What the money was

You should know what the four hundred dollars was, because the number matters in this story more than it seems to.

Mom had been widowed for eleven years. She lives on Dad’s small pension and her Social Security, a little over fifteen hundred a month, and Tammy helps with the bills, which means Tammy knows to the dollar what Mom has.

What Tammy did not know was that in the second drawer of the china hutch, inside an empty Folgers can wrapped in a dish towel, Mom had been saving a separate pile. Five dollars here. Ten when she sold a few jars of pear preserves at the church bazaar. Four dollars a week, on average, for two years.

She told me this later, in the car, somewhere in the flat middle of Kansas. She said she had not told anyone because it was the only money she had ever had that was not for something.

“Thirty years I spent every dollar on somebody,” she said. “Your father’s medicine. You kids. The roof. I wanted to spend four hundred on myself one time and get on a bus and see my sister before one of us is gone.”

The trip had been planned by the church’s seniors group for a year, a chartered coach to a handful of little Iowa and Nebraska towns, three nights in motels, meals included, and the whole thing came to four hundred a person if you shared a room. Mom had written the final payment in August, in cash, on the same Sunday she fell in her bathroom.

I am not saying those two things were not connected. I am saying Tammy found my mother on a tile floor at three in the morning, and that is a thing a person does not get over because the doctor says the hip is fine.

Thursday

I called my husband from Mom’s driveway. Bob was in the barn with a heifer that had gone off her feed, and he listened to the whole thing without a word, the way he listens to a weather report.

“How far is it?” he said.

“Six hundred, give or take. Corning, Iowa. Down in the southwest corner.”

“That’s ten hours with nobody stopping, and she’s going to stop every ninety minutes.” He was quiet. “Take the truck. The Buick will quit on you in Missouri. I will put the new tires on the Ford tonight.”

“Bob, you have the heifer.”

“Heifer will keep. Your mother won’t, not with her sister like that.” He cleared his throat. “I will put two hundred in the glove box. Do not argue.”

I did not argue. In thirty-one years of marriage that man has never once made a speech, and he has never once been absent either.

My boss at the co-op, Gordon Haney, gave me Friday and Monday off without a question, which in the last week of milo harvest is like asking him for a kidney. “Go on,” he said. “I will run the scale myself.”

Thursday evening I went back to Mom’s apartment to take her to supper at the diner on Van Buren, and Tammy was waiting on the porch step with a canvas grocery bag.

I will tell you what was in the bag, because it surprised me.

The weekly pill organizer, the kind with the little doors, filled through Monday night. A typed sheet, laminated at the library, with every pill and the time and what it was for. A list of phone numbers, including the cardiologist’s after-hours line.

A printed map of the hospitals along the route, Wichita, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Creston, with the exit numbers circled in red pen. A pair of the thin gripping socks the nurses hand out, in Mom’s size, for the motel bathroom floor.

“The blood thinner is the one that matters,” Tammy said. She did not look at me. “Same hour, morning and night, with food. If she bumps her head, any bump at all, you take her in. Don’t wait and see. Don’t let her tell you she’s fine. She will tell you she’s fine.”

“Tammy.”

“I’m not done.” Her voice cracked on the last word and she pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth. “Do you know what I do every morning? I walk over there at seven and I stand outside her door and I listen. Before I knock. Every single morning since August, I listen to see if she is moving around in there.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing in me that wanted to.

“I’m tired, Donna,” she said. “I’m so tired. Ned is gone, and the boys are grown, and I am the only one who sees what it looks like. You show up one Sunday a month with a casserole and everybody tells you what a good daughter you are.”

That one landed. It landed because part of it was true.

And it did not change what she had done. A tired woman with a good reason had still gone behind my mother’s back, told a church full of people that Mom was too frail to try, and put four hundred dollars in her own purse. Both things were true at once.

“I will call you every night,” I said. “You will know where she is.”

“Fine.” She wiped her face fast with her wrist, as if she was angry at it. “Then take the bag.”

I took the bag.