My brother taped my mother’s yarn into boxes at Sunday dinner while she sat there crying, and he said, “She’s eighty-six and pissing away $340 a month on mittens for drunks who’ve never once said thanks.” I let him. Two nights later I opened the drawer by her stove and found a name he’d spent fifteen years burying.
Abel has run Mom’s checking account since our dad died, and lately he’d started saying the word “facility” like it was already signed.
So when he pushed back from the table with a roll of packing tape in his hand, nobody stopped him.
Not his wife.
Not my husband.
Not me.
Mom’s yarn lived in four laundry baskets beside her recliner. Reds, grays, and a green so loud it made your teeth hurt.
Abel dumped the first basket into a liquor-store box and dragged the tape across the flaps with that awful screeching sound.
“Abel, those are paid for,” Mom said.
“With what?” he said. “With the money that’s supposed to keep you in this house?”
She was crying by then. Not loud. Just tears running down into the collar of her blue cardigan while she held a half-finished mitten in her lap like he might take that too.
He did.
Rekha studied her plate. Jeremiah looked at me. I looked at the gravy boat, which had a chip on the handle that nobody had ever bothered to glue.
“Three hundred and forty dollars,” Abel said. “In ONE month. I have the statements, Meghan.”
“She likes doing it,” I said.
“She likes being used.” He slapped the tape down on box number three. “She sits up till two in the morning so some guy behind the Ninth Street mission can lose them by Tuesday. Not a single one of those people has ever thanked her. NOT ONE.”
Mom wiped her face with the back of her wrist and kept looking at the window.
“Some of them do,” she said.
Abel laughed. Actually laughed.
He carried all four boxes out to his truck and said he’d drop them in the donation bin at the church on his way home.
I hugged Mom at the door and told her we’d figure it out.
She didn’t hug me back.
That’s the part I heard the whole drive home.
Tuesday I went back with a casserole I didn’t make, because I couldn’t stand myself.
Mom was asleep in the recliner with a cooking show going. I didn’t wake her.
I went looking for the can opener in the drawer by the stove, the junk drawer, the one with rubber bands and dead batteries and a phone book from 2004.
Under the phone book was a notebook.
Green cover. Spiral. Gone soft as a dish rag from handling.
Inside, in Mom’s slanted handwriting, was a list.
A date. A color. A first name. And beside a lot of them, two little letters.
t.y.
Thank you.
I sat at the kitchen table and counted. Twenty-two pages, front and back. Four hundred and eighty-seven pairs of mittens since 2011.
More than half of them had those two letters.
She hadn’t been arguing with Abel at dinner. She’d been keeping score.
That alone should’ve been enough to make me sick. Then I got to page nine.
January 2012. Green. Just “D.”
No first name. No t.y. Instead there was a whole sentence squeezed sideways into the margin.
“Asked if his father still yells.”
My hands went cold.
I flipped ahead. The D was there every winter. Every SINGLE winter. Always green.
“Grew a beard. Too thin.”
“Says his back is bad from the cots.”
“Asked about Meghan’s girls.”
My girls.
I sat down hard on the step stool by the fridge.
There is exactly one D in our family who would ask about my girls. Abel’s son. Dillon.
Dillon, who left in 2009, the same week Dad died. Who Abel told everybody had taken Dad’s service watch out of the dresser and hitchhiked to Phoenix. Who Abel stood up at the funeral luncheon, in front of the pastor, and called DEAD to this family.
We stopped saying his name at Christmas. Rekha stopped saying it at all.
And for fifteen winters Mom had been knitting him green mittens and riding the bus to a mission in Altoona, twenty minutes from her own front door.
I went into the living room and shook her shoulder.
“Mom. Mom, wake up.”
She saw the notebook in my hand and didn’t even pretend.
“You went in my drawer,” she said.
“Is this Dillon?”
She reached for her glasses on the side table and put them on slowly, the way she does when she’s buying time.
“He doesn’t like me writing his name,” she said. “In case your brother ever looked.”
“Mom, Abel told us HE WAS IN PHOENIX.”
“Abel told you a lot of things.”
“Why didn’t you SAY something? In fifteen years?”
She held out her hand for the notebook, and I gave it to her.
She turned to the last page with writing on it. Twelve days ago. The ink was darker there, like she’d pressed down hard.
She didn’t read it to me. She just turned it around so I could see.
“Gray, the double-knit. D. says he’s done hiding. Coming Sunday. Wants Abel to hear it in front of all of them, what he saw in Dad’s bedroom that night.”
I read it twice.
Then I looked at the empty corner where the four baskets used to sit.
“Mom,” I said. “What did he see?”
She folded her hands on top of the notebook and didn’t answer that.
“Abel called me this morning,” she said. “He’s coming Sunday too. Early. He told me he wants to go through your father’s dresser before anybody else gets here.”
The recliner, Tuesday night
“Mom,” I said. “I’m not leaving till you tell me.”
On the TV a man was folding butter into dough. She watched him do it twice.
“He saw your brother take the watch off your father’s wrist,” she said. “Your dad was still breathing. Dillon was in the chair by the window, and Abel thought he was asleep.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of one thing to say.
“Then Abel put it in the dresser. The bottom drawer. Underneath, where the drawer lifts out.” She tapped the notebook. “Dillon told me that the first winter. He wanted me to know he never took it.”
“Is it still there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I sleep in that room, Meghan. Fifteen years I’ve slept eight feet from that drawer.” She took her glasses off and set them on the notebook. “I never looked.”
I stood up. My knees cracked. The bedroom door was right off the hall, half open, and I could see the corner of the dresser from where I was.
“Sit down,” Mom said.
“If it’s in there, Mom…”
“If it’s in there, you’ll have to do something about it.” She looked at me over the top of the notebook, the way she used to look at me over a report card. “Are you going to?”
Dad’s Hamilton
The watch was a Hamilton. Dad bought it at the PX in 1966 with the first paycheck the Army ever gave him, and the back of it had gone smooth where his thumb rubbed it. W.W. scratched in with a pocketknife, crooked.
He wound it every morning at the kitchen table before he’d touch his coffee. Twenty turns. You could hear the little ratchet from the hallway.
He kept his discharge papers and the title to the Buick on the floor of that dresser, under the bottom drawer. The drawer stuck, so you had to lift it up and out. Dad said nobody robs the bottom. He told all of us that. He told Abel that.
The last two weeks of his life, the hospice people put a bed in the bedroom by the window. Mom slept on the couch. Dillon slept on the floor.
Dillon was nineteen. He’d been fired from the Sheetz on Plank Road for being late, and he was late because he was here every night reading Dad the box scores out of the Mirror. Dad couldn’t really hear by then. Dillon read them anyway.
He used to babysit my girls. He taught Brianna to cheat at Uno and Kylie to tie her shoes with the bunny ears, and he never took a dime from me for it.
Dad died on a Thursday, a little after four in the morning.
Dillon was gone by breakfast.
Abel did everything after that. The funeral home, the obituary, the bank, the taxes. He knew where every paper was. He was the one who sat at this dining table with a calculator and told Mom she could keep the house if she was careful, and he’d handle the careful part.
At the luncheon in the church basement he stood up with a ham roll in his hand and said Dillon had stolen Dad’s watch off the dresser and run off to Phoenix, and as far as he was concerned his son was dead.
Pastor Galbraith looked at me. I was standing right next to Abel.
I nodded.
I nodded because Abel was the one who always knew where the papers were. That’s the whole reason. I’d like to have a better one.
Rekha didn’t nod. She put her coat on and went out and sat in the car until it was over.
That Tuesday I didn’t go in the bedroom. I put the casserole in the fridge. I put the notebook back under the phone book, square, the way I’d found it.
Mom watched me do it from the doorway and didn’t say thank you.
When I got home, Jeremiah was up with the TV off.
“Well?” he said.
I told him all of it. The cots, the boots, the watch, the drawer.
He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “So you didn’t look.”
“No.”
“Then what are we doing Sunday?”
Abel’s driveway, Wednesday
I took my lunch break at eleven and drove to Abel’s.
His truck was in the driveway. There was a blue tarp over the bed, held down with two cinder blocks, and I could see a corner of a liquor-store box under it.
The yarn had never gone to the church.
Abel came out in his socks before I got to the porch.
“If this is about Sunday,” he said.
“I want Mom’s yarn back.”
“It’s going Saturday.”
“It’s been in your truck for three days.”
“So it’s going Saturday.” He had his phone out already. He held it up so I could see a statement, the credit union logo, a line that said Hank’s Yarn & Notions. His thumb sat across the bottom half of the screen. “You want to talk about money? Here’s money. Three-forty. You know what three-forty is? That’s groceries. That’s her heat in February.”
“I’ll pay it,” I said. “Let her keep the yarn and I’ll pay the three-forty.”
“You’ll pay.” He laughed the same way he did at the table. “With what, Meghan? Jeremiah’s knees?”
Rekha was in the storm door behind him with a dish towel.
“He’s done all of it by himself,” she said. “Fifteen years. Where were you?”
That one I didn’t have an answer for either.
Abel put the phone away and got a folder off the passenger seat of his car. A brochure was paper-clipped to the front. A brick building, a fountain, an old woman laughing at a bird feeder.
“Laurel Ridge,” he said. “They had an opening. I put four thousand down on Friday. Out of her account, before you ask.” He flipped to a page with two signature lines. “Move-in’s Monday at ten. They want both kids to sign. You can sign right here, and then you can tell her it was your idea too.”
“She doesn’t know about Monday?”
“She knows what she needs to know.”
“Abel, she’s not confused. She keeps a…”
I stopped. He was looking right at me.
“Keeps a what?”
“She keeps that house clean,” I said. “She takes the bus by herself.”
“She takes the bus by herself to the Ninth Street mission.” He shut the folder. “There’s a lady from an estate sale outfit coming Monday afternoon to price the furniture while we’re at Laurel Ridge. Sunday I’m going through Dad’s things, because somebody in this family has to. You want to help, come early and carry boxes.”
He went back up the porch steps. Rekha held the door for him.
“Or stay out of it,” he said, “like you’re good at.”
Window three at the credit union
Thursday morning I took a personal day and drove Mom to the credit union on Seventh Avenue.
It’s her account. Abel is on it as her power of attorney, but her name is still the first one, and she still has her own card in her wallet next to a picture of my girls from 2008.
She went up to window three like she’d been doing it for sixty years, which she had.
“I’d like my October statement,” she said. “All of it. And copies of the checks.”
The teller was a woman about my age named Sandra, with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She knew Mom. She asked about the mittens.
It took her a few minutes. The printer behind her ran and stopped and ran again.
She slid the pages under the glass.
Hank’s Yarn & Notions, $86.00.
Check 1147, $254.00.
Eighty-six and two fifty-four. Three hundred and forty dollars, in ONE month, like Abel said.
The copy of the check was on the second page, small and gray. Mom’s slanted handwriting. Pay to the order of Dillon Walton. Two hundred fifty-four and 00/100. In the memo line it said boots, 12 wide.
“His feet were wet all last winter,” Mom said. “He wouldn’t take cash. He said he’d only spend it on something stupid.”
I read the memo line again.
Abel had been holding his thumb over that check in his driveway.
Sandra was watching Mom. She took her glasses off and let them hang.
“Mrs. Walton, is this the one your son called about?”
Mom didn’t move.
“He called Friday before last,” Sandra said. “He wanted to know who the payee was. I couldn’t tell him over the phone, but he had the check image in his online banking. Then he had us put a stop on anything else written to that name.”
Friday before last. Two days before Sunday dinner. The same Friday he put four thousand down on Laurel Ridge.
He knew. He’d sat at that table and taped the yarn up knowing exactly whose name was on the check, and he’d called those people drunks.
Mom looked at the gray little picture of her own handwriting.
“The one in my lap,” she said. “The one he took out of my hands. That was going to be Dillon’s.”
I asked Sandra how we take Abel off the account.
She said Mom could revoke the power of attorney in writing, and she was a notary, and she could do it right now, at this window, in ten minutes.
Mom put the statement in her purse and snapped it shut.
“Not today,” she said.
“Mom.”
“If I take it away from him on a Thursday, he knows something’s coming on Sunday.” She stood up. “He’s always been good at knowing that. Ask Dillon.”
Sandra gave me the form anyway, folded in thirds.
When we got back to the house I didn’t ask permission. I went straight down the hall into the bedroom. Mom came as far as the doorway and stopped there with her purse still on her arm.
The bottom drawer stuck, like always. I lifted it up and out and set it on the bed.
On the floor of the dresser there was a manila envelope that said ARMY in Dad’s block letters. The Buick title, with a rubber band gone brittle. And a white handkerchief knotted around something heavy.
I untied it on my knees.
W.W., crooked, on the back. The crystal was cloudy. The hands had stopped at twenty to nine on some day nobody would ever know.
I didn’t decide to. I just wound it, twenty turns, the way he did.
It started ticking in my hand.
Sunday, nine-forty
Jeremiah and I were at Mom’s by eight. I put the drawer back in the dresser, empty, with the envelope and the title right where they’d been. The watch went in the pocket of my cardigan.
Mom was in the recliner with no yarn and no TV. She had the green notebook in her lap and Sandra’s form on top of it.
At nine-forty Abel’s truck pulled in. The tarp was still on.
He came in the front door, kissed Mom on the top of the head, said, “Morning, Ma,” and didn’t even look at me. He went straight down the hall.
The bottom drawer screeched coming out. It’s the same sound tape makes.
It was quiet for a while. Then a second drawer came out, and a third. Then the closet door.
When he came back out his face was red up into his hair.
“Somebody’s been in Dad’s things.”
I took the watch out of my pocket and set it on the dining table next to the gravy boat.
He looked at it for a long time.
“Where did you get that,” he said. “Where did you get that? Did he give you that? Has he been in this house? Ma, has Dillon been in this house? Because that’s my point, that’s exactly my point. He took it and he brought it back, and now he wants to make a big show of it. That’s what that kid does.”
“It was under the bottom drawer,” I said.
“Says who?”
“Says Dillon,” Mom said. “In 2010.”
“Oh, says Dillon.” He turned to Jeremiah, like Jeremiah was the one person in the room with any sense. “You hear this? She sits at a mission with a junkie for fifteen years, she writes him checks out of an account I’m trying to keep alive, and now he’s telling her bedtime stories about Dad’s dresser. She’s eighty-six. She’s confused. This is why there’s a place on Monday, this right here.”
“What place on Monday?” Mom said.
He stopped.
“Ma.”
“What place on Monday, Abel?”
He sat down across from her and folded his hands, the way he used to at this table with the calculator.
“Laurel Ridge,” he said. “It’s nice. It has a garden. I did the math for fifteen years so you could stay here, and the math ran out. That’s all. Somebody has to say it, and it’s always me.”
Nobody said anything back. Jeremiah got up and went out the front door, and I heard the tarp come off the truck.
Abel kept going. About the taxes. About the roof in 2015. About how Dad left her nothing but this house and a Buick that didn’t run, and who sat with the funeral man, and who drove her to the eye doctor, and how none of us ever once said thank you to him either.
At noon the doorbell rang.
Rekha was on the porch. Behind her, at the bottom of the steps, was a tall man with a beard and a gray knit cap and brand-new work boots.
He didn’t come up the steps. He waited.
Abel stood. “No. No. Not in here.”
“Your mother invited him,” Rekha said. “She wrote me a letter. Twelve days ago.”
I had never seen Rekha’s handwriting on anything. I hadn’t known Mom had her address memorized.
Dillon came up the steps one at a time and stood just inside the door with his cap in his hands. He looked at the table. At the gravy boat. At the watch.
“I was in the chair,” he said. “You came in at three-thirty. You thought I was asleep. You took it off his wrist and you put it under the drawer, and then you saw me looking at you.” He swallowed. “And you said, ‘Who do you think they’ll believe?'”
Abel laughed. It didn’t come out right this time.
“He was going to give it to you,” Abel said. “Did you know that? He told me that afternoon. Forty years I’m his son, I do every goddamn thing, and he gives his watch to a kid who can’t hold a job at a gas station. So no. No, I didn’t think anybody would believe you.” He looked around the table. “And nobody did.”
Rekha picked up the watch. She turned it over and read the back.
“You showed me a pawn ticket,” she said. “From Phoenix. You kept it in your wallet for a year.”
“Rekha.”
She walked over and put the watch in Dillon’s hand and closed his fingers around it.
Then she held out her palm to Abel.
“The truck keys. The yarn’s in the back. I’m taking it in.”
Jeremiah was already in the doorway with the first box.
Abel stood there with his keys in his fist for a long time. Then he dropped them on the table, next to the gravy boat, and walked out the front door and down the street on foot.
Mom signed Sandra’s form at the dining table. Jeremiah signed as the witness. Monday morning she was at window three at nine o’clock, and I was standing behind her, and nobody went to Laurel Ridge.
Before he left that night, Dillon stopped at the door in front of me.
“You nodded,” he said.
“I know.”
He put his cap back on and went down the steps.
The second Sunday in December
Four laundry baskets beside the recliner. Reds, grays, and that green.
The yarn comes out of my checking account now. Hank’s knows me by name. Three hundred and forty dollars a month, and one Saturday a month I don’t get back because I’m the one carrying the bags to the bus.
Abel hasn’t been to dinner. Rekha comes, alone, and brings rolls.
Jeremiah glued the handle on the gravy boat with the good epoxy from the garage. You can still see the line.
Dillon sat at the end of the table in Dad’s old chair, with the Hamilton loose on his wrist because he hasn’t had the band fixed, and he ate three plates of roast and didn’t say much. Before he left he asked about my girls. I told him Kylie’s getting married in June.
He said, “Huh.” That was all. I’ll take it.
After the dishes Mom got the green notebook out of the junk drawer, from under the phone book, and sat in the recliner with it on her knee.
She licked the tip of her pencil. She wrote the date, and gray, and then she wrote his name out, every letter of it.
If this one got to you, call whoever in your family keeps the notebook, and ask them who’s in it.
For more family drama and the truths that surface at gatherings, read the uncle who made a motion before Grandma’s cake was cut and the mother-in-law who kept tabs on dinner. And for a story about an old wrong finally being faced, there’s the dog tag left on the keys.
