The man behind him in line said, “Some of us got jobs to get back to, grandpa,” and two women laughed.
The old man at my register was $11.37 short, so I put it on my own card.
Friday my manager called me to the back, where that old man had left me something of my mother’s.
She walked out forty-one years ago.
I’d worked register three at that drugstore for nine years.
I’d also been written up in April for a drawer that came out four dollars over, and Samir had told me the next one went to district.
My rent didn’t care about district.
It was a Thursday, close to eight, the hour when nobody in Grand Island has any patience left.
He was eighty, maybe more.
Tan windbreaker zipped up to the chin, and a Mercy visitor sticker still stuck to the chest of it, curling at the corners.
He lined his things up on the belt in a straight row, like he’d planned the order sitting in the car.
Two cartons of vanilla nutrition shakes.
Unscented lotion.
A pair of thick socks with rubber grippers on the bottom.
A crossword book, the big-print kind.
“Forty-six thirty-seven,” I said.
He counted cash out first.
A twenty, a ten, a five, and that was it.
Then he pushed an old card into the reader, chip end first, slow.
The little screen said NOT AUTHORIZED.
He pulled it out and blew on the chip, like that has ever helped anybody.
NOT AUTHORIZED.
Behind him a guy in a gray quarter-zip and earbuds, holding one bag of beef jerky and an energy drink, rolled his whole head back.
“Some of us got jobs to get back to, grandpa,” he said.
Two women further back laughed, and one of them didn’t look sorry about it.
The old man didn’t turn around.
He put one finger on the socks.
“Take those off,” he said. “She’s got socks.”
Eleven dollars and thirty-seven cents.
I had forty-one dollars in checking until Friday and I knew it to the penny.
I swiped my card before I could do that math again.
It beeped and took it.
“Oh, look at her, she’s a SAINT,” the quarter-zip said, grinning at me with every tooth he had.
The old man was reading my name tag.
He read it a long time.
“Deanna,” he said. “Somebody pick that for a reason?”
“My mom did,” I said. “She liked some singer.”
He nodded like I’d answered a whole other question, took his bag, and left the receipt hanging out of the printer.
I ate cereal over the sink that night and didn’t think about him again.
Kiana caught me at the time clock Friday with her coat still on.
“Samir wants you in the back,” she said. “I’ve got three.”
“What’d I do?”
“He said NOW. Not after your coffee. NOW.”
Over the time clock there’s a laminated sign about staff ringing up their own purchases, and I’d walked past it for nine years without reading it.
I read it then.
Running your own card on your own register is a firing thing at that store.
And the quarter-zip had looked exactly like a man who fills out the survey on the bottom of the receipt.
Oh shit, I thought. District.
Samir had the door open before I knocked.
He’s fifteen years younger than me and he still calls me ma’am when he’s nervous.
“Ma’am, did you put your own card through on three last night?”
“He was eleven dollars short,” I said.
“I know the rule. Take it out of my check, write me up, I don’t—”
“Deanna. Sit.”
I sat.
“Am I fired?”
“Nobody’s firing anybody,” he said.
“The old man came back. Ten minutes before we locked up.”
He turned an envelope around on the desk so it faced me.
A plain one, the flap tucked in, not sealed.
“He asked if the lady on three was Deanna,” Samir said.
“Then he asked if your mother was a Viola.”
Nobody had said that name to me out loud since I was seven.
My father didn’t allow it in the house.
The week she left he burned every picture of her in the barrel out back, and every picture she was in, and he let me stand on the steps and watch them go.
“He made me swear I’d hand it to you myself,” Samir said.
I pulled the flap out.
A ten came first, then a one, a quarter, a dime and two pennies.
Eleven thirty-seven, exact.
He’d gone home and dug it up from somewhere.
Beneath the cash lay a photograph.
A little girl on a porch step in a yellow raincoat, squinting, one front tooth gone.
I knew that porch.
I knew that raincoat, because my father burned it too.
I had never seen that picture.
The corners were worn round and soft as cloth, the way a thing gets when somebody keeps it in a wallet and takes it out for FORTY-ONE YEARS.
On the back, in my mother’s slanted handwriting, it said Dee, Easter, 1984.
Clipped behind it was a visitor pass from Mercy, room 412, dated today.
The name line already said DEANNA.
The tucked flap
The pass was for visiting my mother.
Samir put his finger beside the room number.
“She’s there now. That’s what he told me. He said you could come, or not. Those were his words.”
I unclipped it from the photograph.
The clip left a dent across the yellow sleeve.
“Is she dying?”
“He didn’t say that.”
There was a name and phone number inside the envelope flap. Orville.
He’d written the seven with a line through it, then gone over the number again.
I copied it into my phone.
Samir pushed the money toward me.
“Take that, too.”
For a second I couldn’t make my hand pick up the pennies.
I could operate three kinds of register and open a childproof lid with my elbow.
Two pennies were beyond me.
“Can I have five minutes?”
“Take ten.”
I went into the stockroom and called my aunt Gwendolyn.
She was my father’s sister.
When my mother left, she’d come over with clean school clothes and stayed until I stopped asking when Mom was coming back.
She still kept a key to my apartment.
She called it my emergency key, though most emergencies involved something she thought I should dust.
“A man brought me a picture,” I said. “Of me. From Mom.”
“Where are you?”
“At work.”
“Put it away.”
I held the photograph closer.
“He left a pass. Room four-twelve.”
“Don’t go over there by yourself.”
She hadn’t asked which hospital.
I put my hand against a shelf of cough medicine.
“Aunt Gwen. Have you seen her?”
“Wait for me, Deanna.”
The phone beside the sink
Six years earlier, Gwendolyn stood beside my father’s kitchen sink and held out her hand for my phone.
He’d died that morning.
I was trying to cancel a delivery of chair cushions he’d ordered because the old ones offended him.
He’d managed to leave me an argument with a catalog company.
“Give me that,” she said. “I’ll tell people.”
I handed it over.
That was what we did.
She took the thing I couldn’t manage, and afterward I thanked her.
She’d done it with school forms and my first apartment lease.
When I divorced, she brought boxes, packed my cups, and told me which ones weren’t worth taking.
I let her decide about two cups I loved.
By the time she returned my phone that afternoon, she’d arranged a gathering at his house for Sunday.
“No fuss,” she said. “Your father hated a production.”
I asked whether we should try to find my mother.
Gwendolyn put the phone beside the sink.
“Do you want that woman walking through his door?”
“No. I just thought somebody should tell her.”
“I’ll handle it.”
She cried then. I held her until the kettle boiled dry.
When she retired, I started sending her $193.40 every month toward her electricity and phone.
She’d helped raise me. I could at least keep her lights on.
That was how she’d put it.
Sometimes the money left my account before I’d bought groceries.
She knew my payday better than I did.
Once, after my divorce, I’d asked her about my mother again.
“Did she ever call?”
“Your father gave her every chance.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Gwendolyn put down the cup she was drying.
“You think I enjoyed watching you wait by that window?”
I apologized. She let me.
Now I stood between cough syrup and boxes of tissues with that child’s picture in my hand.
My aunt was still on the phone.
“She’ll upset you,” she said.
“She managed that without being here.”
“Don’t get clever with me. I’m coming to your apartment. Meet me there.”
“I have a shift.”
“Then tell Samir it’s a family emergency.”
I looked at the number inside the flap.
“I haven’t decided what it is yet.”
Register three
Orville answered on the fourth ring.
“Deanna?”
My name sounded different without a complaint attached.
“Is she awake?”
“Yes.”
“Can she talk?”
“Yes. She’s getting over pneumonia. They’re keeping her another couple of days.”
I sat on a carton of paper towels.
“What did you tell her about me?”
“That you helped me. That I thought it might be you.”
“And she gave you the picture?”
“She took it out before I finished describing you.”
I pressed the phone against my ear.
“What are you to her?”
There was a scraping sound.
“I’d rather answer with her there.”
I nearly hung up.
Forty-one years, and we were still saving answers for a more convenient room.
“That’s a bad start.”
“I know.”
“Did she send you to my register?”
“No. I went for the things she wanted. I took the wrong card out of the drawer.”
“You didn’t know where I worked?”
“No.”
I could hear him breathing.
Then he said, “She doesn’t want you thinking you bought yourself this trouble.”
I put the picture back into its envelope.
“My aunt knows you’re there.”
“Have you called her?”
“She’s coming with me.”
“Deanna, could you come without her?”
I stood up so fast the carton slid.
“She’s the one who stayed.”
“I know she helped you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
He didn’t fill the gap with an excuse.
That made it harder to stay angry with him, which annoyed me enough to manage it.
“I’ll call you back.”
Kiana was waiting outside the stockroom.
“Do you need me to cover longer?”
“I need to make it through today.”
She looked at the envelope.
“Is that going to happen?”
Kiana was twenty-six. At twenty-six I’d thought a matching bath mat meant my life was settled.
She was ahead of me.
I went back to three.
For twenty minutes I rang up prescriptions from the pickup basket and told people where the cotton balls were.
I gave one man his change twice. He handed the extra back.
Then my aunt called.
“I spoke to him,” she said. “He’s working you up.”
“You called Orville?”
“He knows better than to put this on you while you’re working.”
My hand stopped over the drawer.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’ll come when you’re ready. If you’re ready.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“Somebody has to think.”
I closed the drawer and called Samir.
He couldn’t pay me for the day if I left.
I’d used my time off when my car broke down.
Eight hours. Fourteen dollars and sixty cents an hour.
I wrote $116.80 on the back of my receipt because apparently even meeting your mother required subtraction.
Then I clocked out.
Outside, a message from Orville filled my screen.
“Please read what she believes you sent.”
The message from my number
A photograph came through underneath it.
Someone had printed a text exchange and folded the paper into quarters.
Orville had flattened it against his knee to take the picture.
The number at the top was mine.
The date was six years earlier, the day my father died.
The first message said, “Gwen told me. I’m so sorry, Dee. May I come Sunday? I could stand outside if that’s easier.”
I sat in my car with the door open.
The reply said, “He kept you out of my life. Keep yourself out of his house. I don’t want a call. Don’t make a production.”
I read the last sentence again.
A shopping cart rolled past my bumper.
I got out and pushed it into the rack because it was something with wheels that would go where I put it.
Then I called Orville.
“I didn’t write that.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“Can I tell her?”
“Tell her exactly that.”
“She kept it because she said she’d forget and try again.”
I put my forehead against the steering wheel.
“Why didn’t she try before?”
“She did. There were letters. Visits when you were still at home. But there are things we owe you an answer for.”
“Has my aunt seen her since then?”
“Tuesday. She came Tuesday.”
Three days.
My aunt had sat in my kitchen Wednesday and told me to stop buying the expensive coffee.
She’d known my mother was ten minutes from my workplace.
“Did you know she was the one who sent that message?” I said.
“No. I thought you sent it. So did your mother.”
“Why bring me the envelope, then?”
“Because you were kind to me when you didn’t have to be. I thought perhaps you’d let us ask once.”
I shut the car door.
“Don’t let my aunt answer for me again.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t tell my mother I’m coming until I get there.”
That part came out meaner than I intended. I couldn’t take it back.
I needed one thing that nobody else could promise away.
Gwendolyn’s car was outside my apartment.
She opened my door before I got my key out.
“You’re white as a sheet.”
I walked past her.
“Did you send a text from my phone when Dad died?”
She followed me into the kitchen.
“You were in no state to deal with people.”
“Did you?”
“I answered several messages. You asked me to.”
I put the phone in her hand.
She brought the screen closer, then farther away.
Her reading glasses hung from the front of her blouse.
She didn’t reach for them.
“That was an awful day,” she said.
“For who?”
“Don’t start.”
I took my phone back.
She pulled out a chair.
“Sit down. I’ll put water on.”
“No.”
“Deanna, you’ve been ambushed by a man you don’t know, and now you’re letting him turn you against your family.”
I put the visitor pass into my coat pocket.
“Why were you there Tuesday?”
Her hand stayed on the kettle.
“I wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to do exactly this.”
“Tell me she was alive?”
“Come back and take everything.”
I didn’t have a husband anymore. I rented my home.
My checking account had contained forty-one dollars.
Gwendolyn still thought there was an estate to defend.
I held out my hand for my key.
She closed her fingers around her purse strap.
“After all these years, you’re choosing her?”
“Give me the key.”
She walked out with it.
The chair outside 412
I went after her because I wanted my key, and because she knew the way to my mother.
Those aren’t things I enjoy putting in the same sentence.
She drove to Mercy. I followed.
At the entrance, she waited beside her car.
“I’ll speak to her first,” she said.
“No.”
“She’s sick. You can’t barge in demanding answers.”
“I’m asking to see my mother.”
“Keep your voice down.”
There it was. I could be forty-eight in a parking lot and still get sent back into the house without anybody touching me.
I walked past her.
Orville was beside the elevators with a grocery bag.
He stood when he saw me.
“They asked her to have some clothes brought in,” he said.
“I went home to get them.”
Gwendolyn reached for the bag.
“I’ll take that.”
He kept hold of it.
“Deanna’s here.”
“I can see that, Orville.”
They knew how to argue with each other. Neither needed an introduction.
I took the bag from him.
“Show me.”
He pressed the elevator button. Gwendolyn got in beside us.
On the fourth floor she stepped out first.
“Please,” she said to me. “Let me make sure she’s up to this.”
I stopped beside a chair outside 412.
That was my mistake. A little one.
The size of every other little mistake I’d made with her.
She went inside and pulled the door almost shut.
I could hear my aunt, though not all the words.
“…the text. She’s furious.”
Then a woman’s voice.
“At me?”
My fingers tightened around the bag handles.
“She’s had a terrible morning,” Gwendolyn said.
“She has to understand what this has done to her.”
A pause.
“I can’t do this,” the woman said.
My aunt came out.
“She’s upset. Go home. I’ll call when she’s ready.”
Behind her, the door closed.
I stood there holding a stranger’s underwear in a grocery bag.
I’d given up a day’s pay.
I’d told the woman who raised me to give back her key.
My mother was on the other side of that door and apparently still couldn’t manage me.
I put the bag on the chair.
Orville reached toward my arm, then stopped.
“She thinks you’re here to tell her off.”
“I might be.”
“You’re allowed.”
Gwendolyn turned on him.
“You’ve done enough.”
I sat because my knees had started their own discussion.
My aunt crouched before me.
“Come home with me. I’ll make up the wages.”
She took my hand.
For a second I wanted to go.
I wanted her kitchen and the cup she always gave me.
I wanted somebody to say my mother was bad and let that be the end of the work.
“What did you tell her Tuesday?” I said.
“That you were happy.”
“Did you tell her I knew?”
“You have a life.”
“Did you?”
She stood up.
“Don’t throw away the only mother you’ve actually had.”
I pulled my hand back.
She held it out again, waiting.
I reached past it and turned the knob.
The yellow sleeve
My mother was sitting against two pillows.
She had the gripper socks on.
That was the first thing I could bear to look at.
Eleven dollars and thirty-seven cents, right there under the blanket.
“Did you write that message?” she said.
“No.”
She put both hands over her mouth.
I set the grocery bag beside her bed and took out the photograph.
“Is this yours?”
She nodded.
“How long?”
“Since that Easter.”
I gave it to her.
Her thumb went over the yellow sleeve exactly where the paper was worn.
“I told you not to wear it,” she said.
“The rain stopped before we left.”
“I remember the coat.”
“You said Easter needed pockets.”
A laugh came out of me. It sounded terrible.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You put a chocolate rabbit in one.”
Gwendolyn stepped inside. Orville followed her and shut the door.
My mother held the picture out, then pulled it back.
“May I keep it?”
“For now.”
She laid it on the blanket as carefully as I laid cash in a drawer when someone was counting along.
“Who is he?” I said.
Orville stood beside the foot of the bed.
“I was the man she left with.”
My mother reached toward him, but he stayed where he was.
“Did you know about me?”
“Yes.”
“And you went anyway?”
“Yes.”
I wanted him to blame my father. I wanted something easy to hit.
He gave me nothing but the answer.
My mother was crying.
“I left you,” she said.
“I thought I’d come back after things settled. Then every time it got harder, I let it be harder.”
Gwendolyn folded her arms.
“Well. At least we’re saying it.”
I pulled the chair up to the bed.
“You’re next.”
Four people in the room
Gwendolyn looked at Orville.
“Are you enjoying this? You bring her a picture and suddenly you’re the good one?”
He didn’t answer.
She turned to my mother.
“Tell her who did her hair for school. Tell her who got called when she needed something.”
My mother put the photograph down.
“You did.”
“And now I’m supposed to stand here while she accuses me of keeping some great mother away from her daughter?”
I opened the picture of the text on my phone and held it toward the bed.
“Read it.”
Gwendolyn waved it away.
“I know what it says.”
“She doesn’t know who wrote it.”
My mother reached for the phone.
Gwendolyn kept talking.
“Your father was dead. You were exhausted. You’d been up with him for two nights. I wasn’t going to have her turn his funeral into a scene.”
“You could’ve said no to Sunday,” my mother said.
“And have you appear Monday? Tuesday? She didn’t need that.”
“You told me it was from her.”
“You were never good at taking a hint.”
My mother lowered the phone.
“You told me my daughter wrote it.”
“I did what her father would’ve done.”
There it was, said with her whole chest.
I took the phone back and put it in my pocket.
Gwendolyn faced me.
“Don’t look at me like that. You would’ve sent the same thing if you’d been thinking straight.”
“No.”
“You don’t remember how angry you were.”
“I remember asking you to tell her.”
“And I did.”
My mother sat forward.
“How many?”
Gwendolyn frowned.
“How many messages did you answer for her?”
“I’m not doing an accounting of my life for you.”
“Did she get the letters?”
“I gave them to her father.”
“Even after she was grown?”
“He knew his daughter.”
I pulled my chair closer to the bed.
My aunt’s eyes followed it.
“You wrote back once,” my mother said.
“You said she’d torn up the birthday card.”
Gwendolyn looked at me.
“Your father didn’t want you upset.”
“I never got a card.”
“Then take that up with him.”
Nobody moved.
She pressed her fingers against her mouth, then lowered them.
“You know what I mean.”
Orville took the folded printout from his jacket and laid it beside the photograph.
“This is why she stopped six years ago.”
Gwendolyn pointed at him.
“You could’ve done more. Both of you. Don’t dump forty-one years on me.”
My mother cried harder.
“She’s right about that.”
I turned toward her.
“I could’ve found you as an adult,” she said.
“I could’ve knocked myself. I let other people tell me no because I was afraid you’d say it.”
“Maybe I would’ve.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to tell me all of this was her.”
“No.”
Gwendolyn moved toward my chair.
“Then you see.”
I stood up.
“Put my key on the bed.”
“Deanna.”
“Now.”
She looked at my mother, then Orville, as if one of them might have better sense than me.
“I’ve never taken anything from you.”
“My answer,” I said. “You took that.”
She opened her purse.
The key ring snagged on the lining.
She pulled harder, and a packet of tissues fell out.
Nobody picked it up.
“You’ll call me when this falls apart,” she said.
“You always do. She’ll disappoint you, and you’ll want me to listen.”
I held out my hand.
She dropped the key into it.
“What about Sunday?”
Every Sunday I drove her to errands and stayed until she was finished needing me.
“I’m not coming.”
“And the bills?”
“I’ll pay this month. You’ll cover the next one.”
“After everything I spent on you?”
My mother reached for the blanket, trying to get her feet down.
“Sit,” I said.
She sat.
Gwendolyn started crying then. I nearly went to her. My hand actually moved.
She took a step closer.
“You can’t throw me away for one message.”
I closed my hand around the key.
“Go.”
She waited for me to soften it.
I didn’t.
At the door she turned.
“You’ll miss me.”
“You can miss someone and leave them alone.”
She went out.
My mother held the photograph against her chest.
“Do you want him to go, too?”
Orville moved toward the door before I answered.
“Stay,” I said. “You both owe me more than today.”
The first Sunday
I stayed forty minutes.
I asked about the letters.
My mother told me where she’d sent them and which ones came back.
I asked why she hadn’t come to my school.
She said she should have.
There were answers that helped and answers that made me grip the arms of the chair.
Orville didn’t try to improve either kind.
Before I left, I typed my number into my mother’s phone.
“Call this one yourself.”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow. I have to go home and be angry for a while.”
She nodded.
At the door, I turned back.
“Don’t let that scare you off.”
She started crying again, and then so did I.
Orville handed me the tissues my aunt had dropped.
I took three. Gwendolyn had always said I wasted paper.
At ten the following day my phone rang.
My mother said, “Is now all right?”
We talked for seventeen minutes. I stood in my kitchen the entire time.
On Sunday, Gwendolyn called while I was putting on my coat.
“Are you really not coming?”
“No.”
“I’ve got prescriptions to pick up.”
“Call for delivery.”
“That costs money.”
“So did Thursday’s socks.”
She called me cruel.
I ended the call before I could apologize.
At Mercy, I sat beside my mother while she worked on her crossword.
Orville went home to change.
“Five letters,” she said. “To make amends.”
“That one’s going to take more than five.”
She put down the pencil.
“I know.”
I picked it up and filled in ATONE.
She said my handwriting looked like her mother’s.
I made her tell me about that woman.
Then I made her tell me something that wasn’t sad.
Register three, again
My aunt’s final transfer went through on the first.
$193.40.
The next month, it stayed in my account.
She lost the payment and my Sunday driving.
I took my name off her phone arrangement after she moved it to her own account.
There was no grand announcement.
She had the dates in writing and called twice to argue about them.
I didn’t send another dollar.
At Christmas she tried again.
“Surely you’re past this now.”
“I’ve still got my key.”
“She’ll never be what you want.”
“You don’t get my answer anymore.”
I put the phone down.
My mother didn’t move into my apartment.
We didn’t try to squeeze forty-one years into one hospital visit or call each other every hour.
We started with Saturdays.
Sometimes we went for a walk.
Once we argued in a parking lot because she called me Dee and I told her she hadn’t earned that yet.
She cried. I drove around the block, came back, and got out.
The next Saturday she called me Deanna.
After a month, I let her know she could use Dee.
Orville paid for his own purchases.
Samir made that part clear when I got back to work.
“Next time, get another cashier,” he said.
“I’ll schedule my family discoveries for Kiana’s shift.”
He didn’t laugh until I did.
In December, my mother came into the store with Orville.
He used a card with a piece of tape on it so he couldn’t mistake it for the closed account’s card again.
She put a pair of yellow gloves on my belt.
“For you,” she said.
“You can’t buy your cashier presents.”
“Then they’re for my daughter.”
Kiana opened the next register.
“Go on,” she said. “I have three.”
My mother held the gloves while I came around the counter. Orville stepped aside.
She reached toward me and stopped.
I took her hand and put it on my shoulder.
“Both arms, Mom.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone who knows how much it can take to open a door.
For more family twists, see the wedding dress beside a husband’s coat and the son who put packing boxes outside his mother’s bedroom. There’s also a stepsister demanding $6,000 to return a van.
