The Purse Mom Carried at Eighty

Tonya was sitting at the cake table with the knife in her hand when my mother patted her purse for the third time. It was a soft little pat, the kind you give a dog that is lying where it belongs. Tonya’s knife stopped halfway through the white frosting.

Mom sat at our round table in her royal blue dress with a pink and peach rosebud corsage pinned at the shoulder.

Her hair was set and curled that morning at the beauty shop, white as a church collar. On her arm was a black leather handbag, brand new, so new the handles still squeaked when she moved.

I sat beside her in my burgundy cardigan with my arm around her shoulders. I did not plan to keep it there all afternoon.

It just stayed. Every time Tonya looked over at our table, I felt my mother sit up a little straighter under my hand.

Tonya Briggs was my brother’s girlfriend. She was forty-eight, with long hair dyed a black so dark it looked blue under the fluorescent lights, and she had on a plain black top with long sleeves. She had offered to cut the cake. Nobody had asked her to.

Since March my brother Curt and I had paid her twelve hundred dollars a month to look in on our mother.

Since April she had been taking money out of my mother’s purse. Mom knew it. I knew it. Curt did not, and he was due any minute.

I want to tell this right, so I have to go back to a Sunday night in late September, to my mother’s kitchen table, and a spiral notebook with a green cover that I had seen in her purse my whole life and never once opened.

My name is Vicki Sauer. I am forty-six years old and I carry the mail on Rural Route 2 out of our little post office in central Ohio.

It is a hundred and eight miles a day, six days a week, in my own Jeep with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it.

My mother lives on my route, and so did my dad until he died. Ray Sauer passed in the spring of 2014, a heart attack in the machine shed with the radio on.

For a year after, Mom stood at her mailbox at eleven fifteen every morning, rain or shine, just to say hello to me.

She did fine on her own for years. Then, the spring she turned seventy-nine, she backed her Buick into the propane tank, and Curt and I talked. Mom still lived alone on the home place, eleven miles from town, with sixty acres rented out to the Hoffman boys.

She did not need a nursing home. She needed somebody to drive her to the doctor, carry in groceries, and check that she was taking her pills.

I could not do it. My route runs from eight to four most days and I am on my feet the rest.

My husband Mark works for the electric co-op as a lineman, and when a storm comes through he is gone for two days at a time. Our girls are grown and both live out of state now.

Curt could not do it either, not every day. He is fifty and works at the grain elevator in town, the same elevator where our mother kept the books for thirty-one years.

From the end of September until the last beans come in, usually the end of October, he works twelve and fourteen hour days, seven days a week, running the dump pit.