PART 2: Twenty-Two Times I Tried
“I want you to open it,” I said.
Tessa looked at Gary. Gary looked at his mother. Doreen had her hands flat on the table like she was holding it down.
Bernice sat at the end, in the chair she always sits in, with the blue-striped mug in front of her.
“Open it,” I said again.
Tessa pulled the lid off the coffee can. It came up with a little pop.
Inside was money. Bills, folded and rolled and stacked, some of them soft and gray at the edges from being in there so long.
She reached in and lifted out a bundle held with a rubber band.
“Oh,” she said.
“That’s four thousand dollars,” I said. “And change. The change is what the bank would have paid me if I’d put it somewhere else. I figured that was fair.”
Gary said, “Dad.”
I didn’t look at him. I looked at Bernice.
“Four thousand dollars was the loan,” I said. “I offered it to you twenty-two times. November of ’81. April of ’84. The summer after the layoff. The year Gary broke his arm. The year you moved off Third Street.”
Bernice’s mouth was a flat line.
“I stopped counting out loud,” I said. “But I didn’t stop counting.”
Doreen’s voice came out quiet and steady, which is how she gets when she’s been holding something a long time.
“Twenty-two,” she said. “I counted too.”
Bernice turned her head slowly to look at her daughter.
“You knew,” Bernice said.
“I was there for most of them, Mama.”
“You never said anything.”
“No,” Doreen said. “I didn’t.”
Gary pushed his plate away. He’s forty-six and he’s built like his grandfather, and when he gets angry he goes very still, which is worse.
“So this whole time,” he said. “All those Thanksgiving remarks. All those little jokes about Dad being ‘careful with money.’ Every single year.”
“Gary,” Doreen said.
“No, I want to hear it,” he said. “Grandma, is that true?”
Bernice picked up her spoon. She didn’t tap it. She just held it.
“I fed this family plenty of Sundays,” she said.
“That’s not what he asked,” Gary said.
“I gave you people the only thing I had,” Bernice said, and her voice went up a little. “You think I had four thousand dollars lying around? I sold your grandfather’s truck. The truck he was going to be buried out of.”
Nobody said anything for a minute.
The refrigerator hummed. The faucet dripped once.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I never fought you on it.”
“Then what do you want?” she said.
“I want you to take the money.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s never been what you wanted.”
Bernice’s hand came down on the table, hard enough that the mug jumped.
“You were going to take my daughter and move her to Columbus,” she said. “You had it all planned. You were going to take her three hours away and I was never going to see her again.”
I heard Doreen breathe in.
“Mama,” she said.
“Don’t ‘Mama’ me. You were nineteen years old and you came home with a man who had a job at a grain elevator and a plan to leave.”
“I was twenty-five,” Doreen said.
“You were my baby.”
“I was twenty-five, Mama.”
Bernice’s chin started to go. She pressed her lips together and looked at the wall over the sink.
“I lent you that money because I thought if you owed me something you’d stay close,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s all it ever was.”
Tessa had both hands over her mouth. Gary was staring at his grandmother like he’d never seen her.
I sat back down in my chair. My knees were not what they used to be.
“Bernice,” I said. “You could have just asked to be needed.”
She didn’t answer that.
“I would’ve brought the truck around every Saturday,” I said. “You know that. You know I would have.”
She still didn’t answer.
“Take the money,” I said. “Tonight. It’s on the table. It stays on the table until it’s gone.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then it stays there,” I said. “But you will not say it again. Not to me. Not to Doreen. Not to Tessa, who has been driving you to your hair appointments because nobody else would. This is our house. This kitchen is ours. That ends tonight.”
Bernice looked at the money in the coffee can for a long time.
Then she stood up, using the table, and Doreen stood up with her.
“I’ll drive you home,” Doreen said.
“I can drive myself.”
“You can’t see at night, Mama. Sit down. I’ll get my keys.”
They went out through the mudroom. The screen door banged because neither of them lifted it, and then the car started, and then the kitchen was just the three of us and a can of money.
*
Gary was the first one to talk.
“Dad,” he said. “How long?”
“Since before you were born.”
“He means the can,” Tessa said quietly. “How long have you been putting money in it?”
“Since 1989. I started it thinking I’d get it full and make her take it.”
Tessa started crying, which surprised me. She’s not a crier.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. She told me in the car like it was a sad story about her. I thought — I thought I was helping.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“I told a whole family’s business at their dinner table.”
“You told the truth,” Doreen said. She was standing in the doorway with her keys still in her hand. “You told the truth at this table, and it was the first time in forty-eight years anybody did.”
Tessa wiped her face with her sleeve.
“What happens now?” she said.
“We finish the meatloaf,” I said.
Gary laughed, one short breath, and then he put his head in his hands and stayed like that.
*
The can sat on the kitchen table all night. Neither of us moved it.
Wednesday morning it was still there. Thursday it was still there. Doreen set the salt and pepper around it like it was a centerpiece.
Bernice called Thursday afternoon. Doreen put it on speaker, which she has never done in her life.
“I want to say something,” Bernice said.
“Go ahead, Mama.”
“If Roy took offense at something I said, then—”
“That’s not an apology,” I said.
The line went quiet for a while.
“I know it isn’t,” Bernice said.
“Then try again.”
“Not on the phone.”
“All right.”
“You can bring the girl,” she said. “Sunday. I’ll make the pot roast.”
“Tessa’s her name,” I said.
“I know her name.”
“Say it, then.”
“Sunday,” Bernice said. “Bring Tessa.”
She hung up.
*
Sunday, we went. Gary drove. Tessa brought a pie from the store because she said she couldn’t bake with her hands shaking.
Bernice had the table set for five, which is more than she has ever set it for.
The pot roast was dry because she cooks everything to death and always has.
We ate for twenty minutes about the weather and Gary’s truck and the neighbor’s dog.
Then Bernice put her fork down.
“I didn’t tell the girl a lie,” she said. “I told her a truth that suited me. There’s a difference.”
Tessa nodded.
“I’ve been mad at you since the day you married her,” Bernice said, looking at me. “And I found the one thing that made you keep coming back.”
“You never had to make me keep coming back,” I said. “Doreen wanted to see you. I wanted to see you. That was always enough.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I know it.”
Bernice looked around the room like she was doing arithmetic.
“The money,” she said. “It’s still in your can.”
“It’s still in the can.”
“I don’t want it, Roy. I never wanted it. I don’t know how to say this so it comes out right.”
“Say it plain.”
“I’d like it to go to Vernon,” she said. “He’s got a flat marker out there. Twenty-two years I’ve meant to do something about it and never did.”
Doreen set her napkin down and left the table, and I heard her in the bathroom with the water running.
I hadn’t thought about Vernon in years. He was a quiet man who fixed lawnmowers in the garage and called me “son” from the first day. He died in the winter of ’76 and it took us three days to get the driveway clear enough for the hearse.
“All right,” I said.
“That’s it? All right?”
“It’s four thousand three hundred dollars,” I said. “A stone costs less than that. Whatever’s left, you put in your own pocket and don’t tell anybody.”
Bernice sat with that for a second.
“Thank you,” she said. It came out uneven, like a word she hadn’t used in a while.
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I’m just handing back what was already yours.”
*
Vernon got his stone in September. Gray granite, both names on it, hers already carved underneath with the year left off, which was her idea and nobody argued with her.
It cost two thousand nine hundred.
Bernice took the rest and bought a new furnace, which she did not need, because she has never once in her life let anybody give her something for nothing.
We still have Sunday dinner. She still comes. She still sits at the end of the table.
But something has loosened. She asks Tessa about the wedding. She lets Gary cut the roast. Once, in November, she called me on a Tuesday to ask how the truck was running, and we talked for eleven minutes about nothing at all.
*
It was a Sunday in June when it finally happened. Our anniversary — fifty years, and Doreen had made a cake, and the whole house smelled like vanilla and hot coffee.
I took my seat. Bernice was already there.
Doreen brought the coffee around. She poured Bernice’s first, like always.
And then she set the blue-striped mug down in front of me.
“Ma,” Doreen said, “you’ve got the chipped one today.”
Bernice wrapped her hand around the chipped mug and pulled it toward her.
“Good,” she said. “I like this one.”
She picked up her spoon. She lifted it, and the whole table went quiet, the way it always does.
She set it down on the saucer without making a sound.