Chapter 14: Hush Money

I called my mother from the desk phone with the statement flat under my hand.

She answered on the second ring, and she was laughing.

"Which lines are highlighted?" she said. "The Decembers? She underlined my Christmas."

"Mom, it's going to every woman in the county."

"Then they'll know what I got for Christmas." The laughing stopped. "I'm going to Kroger."

"You're not supposed to be on that knee."

"It's Wednesday. I shop on Wednesday. I have shopped on Wednesday since your father died."

I took my lunch hour at eleven forty.

My mother was already in the produce section when I got there, with her cane hooked on the cart and her purse held in front of her like a shield.

Every head turned as we passed the bananas.

Two women by the apples found something urgent to read on a bag of Galas.

My mother nodded at them.

Her phone rang in the cereal aisle.

She looked at the screen and answered with her brightest voice.

"Pastor! Yes. No, I'm fine."

I could hear the pastor's voice, kind and strained, going on for some time.

"The Club thought it might be easier on me," my mother repeated. "To sit in the back."

She listened for another second.

"Pastor, I have sat in the third pew on the left since 1998," she said. "Tell me which back you mean."

She hung up.

Her hand on the cart handle was shaking, and she looked at it, and put the other hand over it.

"I'm fine," she said, before I could speak. "I'm only hungry."

The cashier was a girl of nineteen who had been in my mother's lunch line as a child.

She scanned the eggs, the saltines and a bag of lemons.