The widow who chairs our parish council scooped six dozen of my tamales off the sale table, told my granddaughter that “charity cases give, honey, they don’t sell,” and started for the kitchen owing us $144. She had no idea what seven years of that coffee can had paid for, or whose check started it.
Every coin Hana drops in that can goes to the credit union on Monday, into an account with her name on it.
She thinks it pays the light bill.
I let her think it.
The first Saturday of every month the parish hall in Pueblo sets out folding tables, and mine has been the same table since Hana came to live with me at seven.
That morning Jeanne Thorsen moved it.
Not far. Just to the back corner by the restroom door, where the mop bucket lives.
Somebody had put a sticker of a frog on that bucket.
“Fire code,” Jeanne said, and tapped her clipboard with one long pink nail.
I didn’t argue. I’m sixty-eight, and I’ve argued with Jeanne exactly once, over a coffee urn, and I lost.
We sold anyway.
Pork, green chile and cheese, and the sweet ones with raisins that Hana calls the mistakes.
$24 a dozen, same as last spring.
By eleven the can was heavy enough that Hana carried it with both hands.
Then Jeanne came back.
She didn’t look at the trays. She looked at Hana.
“Sweetheart, I need six dozen for the council luncheon,” she said. “Be a dear and run them to the kitchen.”
Hana looked at me first. Then she did the math out loud, because that’s what I taught her to do at this table.
“That’s a hundred and forty-four dollars,” Hana said.
Jeanne laughed. A small one, like a kid had told a joke at the wrong funeral.
“Oh, we’re not doing that,” she said. “Mercedes, tell her.”
I didn’t tell her anything.
I’ve worn a hearing aid in my left ear since my last year on the line at the high school cafeteria, and the whole parish knows it, because Jeanne told them.
And Jeanne has a habit.
When she wants to say the real thing, she drops her voice and turns her shoulder to my bad side.
So I reached up and turned the dial as far as it goes.
The hall came roaring in. Folding chairs, the raffle microphone, somebody’s toddler screaming about a balloon.
And under all of it, Jeanne, low and sweet, bent over my granddaughter.
“Your grandmother lived off this church’s pantry boxes the whole year you showed up. Charity cases give, honey. They don’t sell. You ought to be grateful anybody buys from you at all.”
Hana’s fingers went white on the can.
She didn’t cry. She’s fourteen.
She set the can down very carefully, like it might go off.
At the cake table beside ours, Priscilla Galloway put her fork down and left it there.
“Jeanne,” I said.
She turned around with her company face already on. “Yes, hon?”
“Say that again. Louder. I want to be sure I heard you right.”
“Mercedes, I don’t know what you think you—”
“I HEARD EVERY WORD.”
The cake table went quiet. Then the table past that one.
Jeanne’s chin came up. “This parish carried you two for a year. I signed those pantry slips myself.”
“You did,” I said.
“Then call it your tithe,” she said, and picked up three trays.
Hana stepped in front of the other three.
“Those are SIX DOZEN,” Hana said. “She gets up at four in the morning to make those.”
“Then she can get up at four for the Lord,” Jeanne said.
Something in my chest went flat and calm, the way it used to when the fryer caught and everybody else started yelling.
I opened the cash box.
Under the twenties, under the roll of quarters, there’s a passbook from the credit union with a rubber band around it.
It has gone with me every Monday for seven years.
Hana has never once seen the inside.
I took the band off.
“You want to talk about who gives and who takes, Jeanne?” I said. “Read the front page.”
“I’m not reading your little—”
“READ THE FRONT PAGE.”
She set the trays down to take it. She only meant to glance.
Stapled inside the cover is a copy of a check for $100. The first money that account ever saw, written the first Saturday Hana ever sat at my table.
The handwriting is small and leans left.
The memo line says “for the little one’s school.”
Jeanne didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she said one word, the way you’d say it across your own kitchen.
“Greg.”
“He bought the first dozen I ever sold,” I said. “He never once took his change.”
“He told me that money went to the missions,” Jeanne said.
Sergio Lyons had come over from the raffle with the cash bag still in his fist. He looked at the check, and then at Jeanne, and his face went the color of dishwater.
“Jeanne,” he said. “Tell her what Greg asked the council to do. The spring before he passed.”
Jeanne’s mouth went thin.
She looked at Hana. Then at the can. Then at me.
“That was supposed to stay private,” she said.
And Hana, very quietly, said, “What was?”
The raffle bag
Jeanne didn’t answer her. Sergio did.
He set the raffle bag down on our table, right on top of the green chile ones, and kept his hand flat on it.
“Greg came to the April council meeting that year,” he said. “He asked to speak. He asked us to take ten thousand dollars out of his estate when he went, and put it toward this girl’s schooling.”
He pointed at Hana with two fingers, the way he points at a raffle winner.
“Ten thousand,” Hana said.
“He wrote it out by hand. Priscilla typed it up for the minutes.”
At the cake table, Priscilla looked at her lemon cake like it had said something rude to her.
Priscilla has taken the council minutes for as long as I’ve had this table. She sells the same lemon cake every month, and every month it’s a little dry.
“And Jeanne had it struck,” Sergio said. “Family business, she said. Private.”
“It was a letter, Sergio,” Jeanne said. “It was never a vote.”
“It was in his will.”
“His will says the parish. It says the parish, and the parish got it.”
Jeanne still had the passbook in her hand. I took it back.
I put the rubber band on it the way I always do, twice around, and set it in the cash box under the quarters.
My ear was still turned all the way up. Every word in that hall came at me like it was mine.
Jeanne picked up her clipboard. She left the three trays where she’d set them.
“Council meets Thursday, seven o’clock,” she said. “Anybody who wants to discuss council business can discuss it at council.”
She didn’t turn her shoulder this time. She said it to the whole corner.
Then she walked to the kitchen with nothing in her hands, and the kitchen door swung behind her twice.
Sergio picked up his bag. He looked like he wanted to say something else to me. He went back to the raffle instead and read off a number nobody had.
Hana stood very still beside the can.
“Grandma,” she said. “Where’s the ten thousand dollars?”
The first dozen
Hana came to me on a Thursday in February, seven years ago, with a backpack and a booster seat she’d already outgrown.
My daughter Isabel left her with me for the weekend. She was going to Albuquerque with a man named Colt who had a boat trailer and no boat.
That weekend is seven years long now.
I had retired off the line in January. Twenty-six years of breakfast burritos and Friday fish, and the fryer hood so loud that my left ear quit about a month before I did.
My pension came to $1,140 a month. The house was paid for. That’s all it was.
So I did the one thing I knew how to do in quantity.
I’d made tamales for the cafeteria staff party every Christmas for twenty-two years. Nobody ever let me bring anything else.
The first Saturday in March I carried four dozen into the parish hall in a laundry basket. I got the table by the window, the one I would keep for seven years.
Hana sat beside me on a folding chair with her feet not touching the floor. I gave her a coffee can and a roll of quarters and told her she was the bank.
She made change wrong for an hour. Nobody complained.
Greg Thorsen came at ten.
He was a deacon then. Tall, with a cardigan that had a pen clipped in the pocket, and the kind of quiet that made people lower their own voices around him.
I knew him the way you know everybody in a parish. Wave at Mass. Coffee after.
He bought a dozen pork.
“I don’t carry cash,” he said. “Jeanne carries the cash.”
He wrote a check standing up, with the checkbook flat on his other palm. He was left-handed and curled his wrist over the top, like a kid hiding a spelling test.
He tore it off and handed it to Hana.
It said one hundred dollars.
“I can’t change a hundred,” I said.
“Then don’t,” Greg said.
He tapped the memo line before he let go of it. I hadn’t looked at the memo yet.
“Not groceries, Mercedes,” he said. “School.”
Then he took his dozen and went back to the coffee urn like he’d bought a raffle ticket.
I opened Hana’s account at the credit union that Monday with his check. The girl at the counter made me a copy for my records and I stapled it inside the cover, because I didn’t want to lose it and I didn’t know yet why.
After that he came most months. One dozen. A twenty and a ten. He’d be walking away before Hana could count the six back.
That same March, the boxes started.
Saturday mornings, early, on my porch. A cardboard box from the parish pantry with rice and beans and cooking oil and a jar of peanut butter, every week like a clock.
I never once saw who left them.
On top of each box was a slip, taped down. Parish Pantry, it said across the top, and a printed line that said Approved, and on the line, in big round ballpoint, J. Thorsen, Council Chair.
Down in the bottom corner of every slip was something else in pencil. Two letters and a number. G.T. 1. G.T. 2. On up.
I figured G.T. was some kind of grocery ticket. Pantry business. I never asked.
But I kept every slip.
A line cook keeps her tickets. You don’t throw out a ticket until the order’s paid, and I didn’t know how to pay for those.
So they went in the recipe tin on top of the refrigerator, under my mother’s cards for menudo and biscochitos.
Greg died that October, the year Hana turned eight. His heart, in the hardware store, in the aisle with the furnace filters.
Half the parish went to the funeral. Jeanne sat in the front row in a navy suit and shook every hand.
The boxes stopped in November.
I had my pension squared away by then, and Hana was in school, and I figured somebody at the council had decided I was on my feet.
And every Christmas since, at the parish dinner, Jeanne has found me by the punch bowl.
“And how are you two managing now?” she says. Loud enough to reach the coat rack.
She tells new people she signed our pantry slips herself. She tells it like it’s a story about her.
That was all I had ever known about any of it, until eleven o’clock that Saturday.
We packed up early. Hana didn’t make change for anybody else.
In the truck, she held the can on her lap with both arms around it.
I had the cash box on the seat between us. Before I found reverse, she had the rubber band off the passbook.
The phone on the wall
Hana read the last page out loud while I drove. She reads everything out loud when it matters to her.
“Eighteen thousand six hundred and twelve dollars,” she said. “And forty cents.”
I kept my eyes on Northern Avenue.
“Grandma. The light bill is sixty-one dollars.”
“I know what the light bill is.”
“You said the can pays it.”
“I said it helps.”
“It never paid anything,” she said. “It just went in here.”
She turned the pages back one at a time. Every Monday for seven years, in the girl’s handwriting at the counter. Forty-two dollars. Two hundred and six. Ninety-eight, that was a snow Saturday.
“So who paid the light bill?”
“I did.”
“With what?”
“With my pension, Hana.”
She closed the passbook and held it shut with both thumbs. She didn’t say anything else until we were home.
At home I put the leftover trays in the freezer. Three dozen pork. Two of the mistakes. I had the freezer door open when she asked the next one.
“Was she telling the truth? About the pantry boxes?”
I thought about saying no.
“Yes,” I said.
“The whole year?”
“From March to November.”
“Did you ask for them?”
“I filled out a card at the rectory,” I said. “One card. Your mother was gone and I didn’t know yet how long.”
Hana nodded slowly, like she was adding a column.
“Okay,” she said.
She went to her room and shut the door, and I heard the radio come on.
The phone rang at eight-fifteen. The kitchen phone, the one on the wall with the long cord, because nobody under seventy calls that number.
I turned my ear back down before I picked up.
“Mercedes,” Jeanne said. “I’m going to save you some embarrassment.”
She sounded like she was reading it.
“Thursday’s agenda goes out tomorrow,” she said. “If the council is going to discuss what my husband gave to whom, the council is going to want the whole picture. I’ll be reading the pantry records into the minutes. Every box. Every slip I signed. The household named.”
I had the cord wrapped around my wrist without meaning to.
“The minutes go in the bulletin, Mercedes. Four hundred families get that bulletin.”
“I know where the minutes go.”
“Then you know what I’m telling you. Is that what you want for that girl? Her name in the bulletin next to thirty-some pantry boxes?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m not a cruel woman,” she said. “I signed those slips. I’m the one who carried you.”
Down the hall, Hana’s radio went quiet. Her door didn’t open.
“Or,” Jeanne said, “you can bring six dozen to the luncheon Thursday, and we’ll call it even.”
Sergio’s folder
Sergio Lyons was on my porch at seven Tuesday morning with a manila folder and his car still running at the curb.
He wouldn’t come in.
“I’m not here,” he said. “Understand me. I’m not here.”
He’s seventy-one and he’s been the parish treasurer for nineteen years. He does the books on a desktop computer older than Hana, and he prints everything, because he doesn’t trust what he can’t hold.
He opened the folder against the screen door so I could read it through the mesh.
The first page was a deposit slip from the May after Greg died. Estate of Gregory Thorsen. Ten thousand dollars. General Fund.
“There was no purpose on it,” Sergio said. “The will said the purpose was in his letter to the council. And the letter wasn’t in the minutes anymore.”
“Because she had it struck.”
“Because she had it struck,” he said. “So it was just money. And Jeanne said, Sergio, put it where it does the parish some good.”
The second page was a transfer. From General Fund to Council Hospitality. Ten thousand dollars even.
Two signatures on the bottom. Jeanne’s, big and round. And under hers, small and neat, his.
“What’s Council Hospitality?”
He looked past me, into my kitchen.
“The luncheon,” he said. “Once a month, after council. Sandwiches. Coffee. A sheet cake at Christmas. It used to come out of the collection. After that it came out of Greg.”
Behind me, I heard Hana’s door. I hadn’t heard her get up.
She came down the hall in her hoodie and socks and stood behind my shoulder, reading through the mesh like me.
Sergio turned to the last page. A balance statement for Council Hospitality, printed Monday night.
Two hundred and twelve dollars and sixteen cents.
Hana did it out loud before either of us could stop her.
“Ten thousand dollars,” she said. “Twelve luncheons a year. Seven years. That’s eighty-four luncheons.”
She was quiet a second.
“That’s like a hundred and nineteen dollars a luncheon.”
“About that,” Sergio said.
“So that’s why she wanted them free,” Hana said. “There’s no money left for the luncheon. Because they ate it.”
Sergio didn’t answer her. He didn’t have to.
I stood there with my hand on the screen door latch and thought about six dozen tamales on a council table, served on paper plates to people who had eaten Greg Thorsen’s money one sandwich at a time.
My tamales were supposed to be the last luncheon on Hana’s money.
“Sergio,” I said. “You have to say it Thursday.”
“I signed that transfer, Mercedes.”
“Then say that.”
“I’m seventy-one. My name’s been on these books since Hana’s mother was in grade school.” He shut the folder. “You want me to stand up and tell four hundred families I put a dead man’s school money into coffee cake?”
“I want you to tell the council.”
“Same thing,” he said. “The minutes go in the bulletin.”
He went down my steps with the folder under his arm. Halfway down he stopped, took one page out, folded it twice, and came back up.
He pushed it into the gap at the edge of the screen door, where the frame doesn’t close right.
“I didn’t bring you that,” he said.
Then his car pulled off from the curb, and the page fell onto my mat.
It was the transfer. Both signatures.
Jeanne’s porch
I tried Jeanne on Wednesday. My own way, first, with nobody watching.
I have known her forty years. I thought that was worth one conversation without a clipboard in it.
I put a dozen of the mistakes in a foil pan, because you don’t go to a widow’s house with nothing, and I drove to the north side.
The Thorsens’ house is brick, with a porch light that’s always on. Greg’s truck was still in the driveway. Seven years, and she had never sold it. Somebody keeps the tires up.
She opened the door before I knocked. She didn’t open the screen.
“If that’s a bribe, it’s a small one,” she said.
“It’s a dozen tamales, Jeanne.”
“Is it six?”
“It’s one.”
She looked at the foil pan and didn’t take it.
I said what I had come to say. Put Greg’s letter back in the minutes. Fund it from the parish, whatever it takes, a little at a time. Do it quietly, the way she likes things done, and I would never say one word about the luncheons to anybody.
She let me finish. Then she started, and she didn’t stop for a while.
“Greg gave away everything he ever touched,” she said. “Forty-one years. The roof fund. The missions, or so he said. Every drunk on Abriendo who needed bus fare. The Mendoza boy’s funeral, the whole thing, casket and all, and do you know who stood next to that casket and got thanked?”
“Jeanne.”
“Him. Always him. I ran the pantry, Mercedes. I ran the giving tree. I chaired every committee in that building for twenty years, and when he died, they put his name on the hall plaque.”
She had both hands on the edge of the door.
“And then he stands up in April, in front of my council, with a letter. For your girl. I’m supposed to sit at the head of that table and clap?”
“He wanted her in school.”
“He wanted his name on something with a child in it,” she said. “And a nice story about it after.”
She went back into the house and left the door open. When she came back she had a blue binder, the kind with a clear sleeve on the front.
Parish Pantry, the label said, in the same round ballpoint.
“Do you know what this is? This is the pantry ledger from that year. I kept it. It’s mine.”
“That belongs to the parish.”
“It belongs to whoever kept it,” she said. “And on Thursday I’m going to open it.”
She held it against her chest with one hand flat on the cover.
“Thirty-four boxes. Every one signed by me. You’ll hear it all.”
I didn’t know that it was thirty-four. I had never counted the slips in my tin.
“And Mercedes,” she said. “Your table. Tabitha’s been asking for a spot for her candles by the window. I think the corner suits you.”
She closed the door. The porch light stayed on.
I sat in the truck with the foil pan on the seat and called Priscilla Galloway from my cell phone.
Priscilla picked up on the fifth ring. She sounded like she’d been sitting next to the phone deciding not to answer it.
“I know why you’re calling,” she said.
“You typed it up. Greg’s letter.”
“I typed a lot of things.”
“Priscilla. You were at the cake table. You heard what she said to Hana.”
There was a television on wherever she was, a game show, somebody winning a car.
“I’ve got to live in this parish,” Priscilla said. “So do you, Mercedes.”
“Will you say it Thursday?”
“I can’t,” she said, and hung up.
The recipe tin
Wednesday night I got up on the step stool to make masa, because I had made up my mind about Thursday.
I would bring six dozen to that council table. Not free.
The masa harina lives on top of the refrigerator next to the recipe tin. When I moved the bag, the tin came down with it and hit the counter, and the lid popped.
My mother’s cards went across the linoleum. So did the pantry slips.
Hana was at the kitchen table with her algebra. She got down on the floor before I could get off the stool.
She picked up a slip and read the top of it out loud.
“Parish Pantry. Approved. J. Thorsen, Council Chair.”
“Give me those, mija.”
She didn’t give them to me. She picked up another one. And another. She stacked them on the table and squared the edges like a deck of cards.
“How many are there?”
“I never counted.”
She counted. Out loud, of course.
“Thirty-four,” she said.
The same as Jeanne’s binder. So I had kept every single one.
Hana had the passbook on the table still, from Saturday. She had been carrying it around the house since then like it was hers, which it is.
She opened it to the front page. The copy of Greg’s check, stapled inside the cover. Small handwriting that leans left.
Then she turned the top slip over, so the corner was up.
G.T. 1.
In pencil. Small. Leaning left.
She put her fingertip under the G on the slip and her other fingertip under the G in Gregory on the check.
The bottom of the G curls back up the same way on both. Like a hook somebody bent with pliers.
“Grandma,” she said. “That’s the same G.”
I came down off the stool.
She was already going through the pile, turning every slip so the corner was up. G.T. 2. G.T. 9. G.T. 17. All the same pencil, all the same hand, curled over the top like a kid hiding a test.
“G.T. isn’t grocery ticket,” Hana said. “It’s him.”
The last slip was the one on the bottom of the pile. G.T. 34. The date on it was the second Saturday of October.
Greg died the third week of October.
“He was buying them,” Hana said. “The boxes. The whole year. He paid for every single one.”
I sat down in the chair across from her. My knees had decided that for me.
Rice and beans and cooking oil and peanut butter. Every Saturday, on my porch, early, before the hardware store opened. Thirty-four times.
I had thanked the parish for them every Christmas, to Jeanne’s face, by the punch bowl.
Jeanne’s binder. It’s mine. I kept it.
You don’t keep a pantry ledger in your own house for seven years unless it says something on it you don’t want anybody reading.
“She knew,” Hana said. “She signed them. She had to know whose money it was.”
She put the two G’s side by side again, as if one more look might change them.
“This parish carried you,” she said, in Jeanne’s voice, so close to it that I almost laughed.
Then she didn’t do the voice anymore.
“It was him. Every box had her name on top and his initials on the bottom.”
Thursday, seven o’clock
I got up at four. Hana got up at four with me, without being asked, and spread masa until her wrists hurt.
Six dozen. Two of each kind.
The council meets in the room behind the parish office, at two folding tables pushed together under a picture of the Pope two Popes ago.
There were seven chairs. Jeanne at the head with her clipboard and the blue binder. Sergio beside her with his printouts. Priscilla at the far end with the minutes binder and a steno pad. Lacey from the Altar Society. Deepak, who runs the Knights’ fish fry. Two others I knew by face.
Hana and I came in at seven with the trays stacked.
I set them down in the middle of the table, all six, and took the foil off the top one.
“Six dozen,” I said. “A hundred and forty-four dollars. Council Hospitality can pay me.”
Jeanne didn’t look at the tamales. She opened her binder.
“Since Mrs. Zamora has asked to be on the agenda,” she said, “and since she wants to discuss what my late husband gave to this parish, I think the council should have the full record. In the interest of being transparent.”
“Jeanne,” Lacey said. “Is this necessary?”
“She wanted it, Lacey. Priscilla, are you getting this?”
Priscilla had her pen on the pad. She wasn’t writing.
Jeanne started reading.
“March, first Saturday. One box, Zamora household. Approved, J. Thorsen. March, second Saturday. One box, Zamora household. Approved, J. Thorsen. March, third Saturday.”
She went on like that. Rice, beans, oil. She read the peanut butter out every time.
She got to June before Deepak cleared his throat.
“We get the idea, Jeanne.”
“Do you? Because I don’t think she does. I think she’s forgotten who carried her.” Jeanne turned the page. “July, first Saturday.”
Hana was standing beside me with the recipe tin in both hands, the way she carries the coffee can.
I took the lid off. I took the top slip out and laid it on the table in front of Jeanne, face up, next to her binder.
Then I turned it over.
“Read the corner, Jeanne,” I said.
She didn’t look down.
Hana set the passbook open next to the slip. The check, stapled inside the cover. The two G’s six inches apart.
Lacey leaned in first. Then Deepak. Then Sergio, who didn’t need to, because he was looking at the corner of Jeanne’s own ledger, the column on the right side of every page that Jeanne’s flat hand had been covering for twenty minutes.
“That column says G.T.,” Sergio said. “All the way down.”
Jeanne shut the binder.
“He was dying,” she said.
Nobody said anything.
“He knew by that March. The doctor told him in February. He told me, and then he told me not to make a fuss about it, and then do you know where he spent his Saturdays? His last Saturdays?”
She was looking right at me.
“Not with me. In your driveway. Six in the morning, with a box of rice in the back of his truck. And then he’d come home and ask me to sign the slip, so it would look like the parish.”
“Jeanne,” Lacey said.
“I signed them. Thirty-four times. I signed them because he asked me to, and it was the only thing he asked me for all that year.”
She pushed the binder away from her.
“And when he was gone, everybody at that funeral shook my hand and talked about him. Forty-one years. He left me the house and a note about the gutters. He left her girl a letter.”
“So you threw it out,” Deepak said.
“I did not throw it out. I had it struck. It’s not the same.”
At the far end of the table, Priscilla stood up.
She hadn’t said a word all night. She opened the minutes binder and flipped all the way to the back, past the last tab, to a plastic sleeve somebody had taped in.
She took out two sheets of paper. One typed. One in pencil, small, leaning left.
“You told me to take it out,” Priscilla said to Jeanne. “I took it out of the minutes. I put it in the back.”
Jeanne turned in her chair. “Priscilla.”
“Seven years, Jeanne. I’ve carried that binder home every month.”
Priscilla read it standing. Her voice shook on the first line and then quit shaking.
“I ask the council to use what I leave for the schooling of Hana Zamora, until she’s done with it. And I ask that nobody ever make Mercedes feel it. Gregory Thorsen.”
Nobody looked at the tamales.
Hana held the recipe tin against her stomach. Her mouth moved without any sound. She was saying the last line over to herself.
“Well,” Jeanne said. “Now everybody’s felt it.”
Deepak moved to enter Greg’s letter into the minutes, as written, from April seven years ago.
Lacey seconded.
Then Deepak moved that the parish repay ten thousand dollars from the building reserve into Hana’s account at the credit union, in four payments, over two years.
Sergio raised his hand before Lacey could second.
“Put in the minutes that I signed the transfer,” he said. “My name. Second signature. Put it in.”
“Sergio, you don’t have to,” Lacey said.
“Priscilla, put it in,” Sergio said.
Priscilla wrote it down.
It passed five to one. Jeanne didn’t raise her hand either way, and Lacey counted her as the one.
The minutes would go in the bulletin. All of them. The thirty-four boxes, with our household named in every one. Four hundred families.
I had brought those slips into that room knowing that.
Jeanne stood up. She picked up her clipboard and left the blue binder on the table.
“You can find somebody else to chair this,” she said.
At the door, she stopped and looked at the six trays.
“I won’t be paying for those,” she said.
“Hospitality’s got two hundred and twelve dollars,” Hana said. “We’ll take a check.”
The frog bucket
The first Saturday in December, Lacey offered me my old table back by the window.
I said I’d keep the corner.
The mop bucket still has the frog on it. Somebody added a Santa hat with a marker.
Tabitha has the window now with her candles. She’s nice enough. They smell like pine trees from a store.
The minutes came out in the bulletin the second week of November. A woman I’d never spoken to stopped me on the church steps afterward and put her hand on my arm and didn’t say anything, and that was worse than if she had.
I go to the eight o’clock now instead of the ten.
The first payment from the building reserve went into Hana’s account the Monday before Thanksgiving. Hana walked it in herself and watched the girl at the counter write it in the passbook.
She keeps the passbook now. She keeps the rubber band too.
She also taped the light bill to the refrigerator. When it’s paid she writes her initials on the corner, small, in pencil.
I haven’t told her to stop.
By eleven the can was heavy enough that she needed both hands.
Then Jeanne came across the hall.
She didn’t have a clipboard. She had her purse over her arm and her sunglasses pushed up in her hair, and she stood at our table like any other customer.
“A dozen of the sweet ones,” she said.
Hana counted them into the foil. Twelve. She didn’t call them the mistakes.
Jeanne put two twenties on the table.
Hana did the math out loud.
“Twenty-four,” she said. “Out of forty. That’s sixteen back.”
She counted it out of the can. A ten. A five. A one. She held it across the table and didn’t put it down.
Jeanne looked at the money in Hana’s hand for a long time.
Then she took her change.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has ever run a table at a church sale.
For more stories about family secrets and the truths that surface at the hardest moments, read I Never Read Our Daughter’s Adoption Papers and I Kept My Daughter’s Ashes Above My Husband’s Winter Boots for Six Years. And for another family clash over money and respect, see Grandma Writes Pop’s Checks Every Month.
