The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand

The envelope was the kind that comes twelve to a box at the dollar store, pale yellow, with my name on the front in Janet’s good handwriting.

She slid it across the paper tablecloth with two fingers, past the plate of ham buns and cheesy potatoes I had not touched.

“Paula and I wanted to do a little something,” she said. “For all your help with Mom.”

We were in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church on the south side of Ottumwa, forty minutes after we had put Evelyn in the ground beside her husband. The funeral committee had the long tables covered in white paper, and somebody’s grandbaby was under one of them with a scotcheroo in each fist.

I opened the envelope because they were both watching me.

There was a card with a watercolor lily on it. Inside, in Janet’s hand, it said, “Lori, thanks for helping out with Mom. Love, Janet and Paula.” Tucked in the fold was a plastic gift card to Hy-Vee.

Twenty-five dollars. It said so on the little paper sleeve.

I had worked the deli counter at that Hy-Vee for nineteen years. I get a discount there.

“That’s real thoughtful,” I said, because my mother raised me to say something.

Paula smiled the way you smile at a waitress. She was the younger one, fifty-six, down from Kansas City in a navy pantsuit, with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair. Janet was fifty-eight and had driven the hour and a half from Ankeny that morning. They were both blonde out of the same box and they both had their mother’s chin.

“There’s one more thing,” Janet said, and she lowered her voice, which told me she knew how it was going to sound. “We’ll need Mom’s house key back. Today, if you’ve got it on you.”

I looked at her.

“The realtor’s coming Monday to walk through,” she said. “And you know how it is after a funeral. Things walk off. We just want to be fair to everybody, so we’re collecting all the keys. It’s nothing personal.”

“All the keys,” I said.

“Yours is the only other one,” Paula said. “So, yours.”

I want to tell you what went through me, because it was not what you would think. It was not anger, not right then. It was the bathtub.

I thought about Evelyn’s bathtub, the old pink one with the grab bar my husband had screwed into the studs, and the white plastic bench that sat across it. I thought about my knees on the bath mat. I thought about how you wash an old woman’s hair when she cannot tip her head back: you fold a washcloth over her eyes and you pour from a plastic pitcher with your other hand flat against her forehead like a little roof, and you talk the whole time so she is not frightened.

I had done that on Tuesdays and Saturdays for six years. Then, when she could not get to the tub anymore, I did it in the bed with a basin.

And here was the key to that house, being called in like a library book.

I did not say any of that. I would like you to understand why, because I have a friend who used to be a dispatcher and she says I should have stood up and said it to the whole room.