What Mothers Say About Money

Dess

Colleen Rourke's house in Fall River smelled, on every Thanksgiving of Dess's adult life, of turkey, cinnamon, burnt marshmallow, and a faint, persistent, unplaceable note of lemon furniture polish that had been in the walls since 1987.

It was a narrow two-story on a hill above the old mill district, painted a shade of yellow that its owner described as buttercup and the neighbors described as aggressive. There was a plastic Pilgrim on the porch. There was a wreath on the door made of pinecones and a hot-glue gun. The living room window held a ceramic turkey in a Santa hat, which Colleen insisted was "transitional," and the whole place had the cramped, fussy, warm, overlit look of a house in which one woman had spent thirty-five years making sure that nobody could ever accuse it of being cold.

Dess stood on the porch at one o'clock on Thursday with a pie in one hand and a bag of rolls in the other and, for the first time in her adult life, did not want to go in.

Be nice, she told herself. It's a holiday. You are a mature woman of thirty. You will go in, you will eat the turkey, you will say "yes, Mom," and "no, Mom," and "I'm drinking plenty of water, Mom," and at no point will you mention the memorandum.

She opened the door.

"DESSIE!"

The cry came from the kitchen, and a moment later a small wild figure in a reindeer sweater came tearing down the hall with her arms out and her hair flying, and Dess just had time to hold the pie up out of danger before she was engulfed.

"Mom. Mom. Careful. The pie."

"I don't care about the pie! Let me look at you." Colleen held her at arm's length. She was fifty-four, small and round and bright-eyed, with a cloud of dyed auburn curls and a face that still bore the traces of a famous prettiness, and she was wearing, besides the sweater, a pair of enormous gold hoop earrings and a lipstick the color of strawberry jam. "Oh, honey. You're glowing."

"I'm sweating. It's eighty degrees in here."

"Ray had the oven on since six. You're glowing. You're a little round! Are you round?"

"I'm twelve weeks. I'm the size of a lime."

"You're round in the face. It's the most beautiful thing I ever saw." Colleen kissed her on both cheeks, noisily, and took the pie. "Come in. Come in. Take your coat off. Sit down. Don't lift anything. Did you eat? Have you eaten? I made the stuffing the way you like it, with the chestnuts. And I made the other one, the one with the sausage, in case you wanted to be daring."

"I'm not feeling daring."

"No, of course not. You never were." Colleen patted her cheek. "My careful girl."

…

Ray Dufresne was in the backyard, in a Patriots jersey and an apron that read KISS THE COOK (I'M ARMED), doing something in the dusk with an enormous aluminum pot and a propane burner and a turkey on a stick.

"It's a fryer," he said, by way of greeting. He was fifty-eight, big and sandy-haired and affable, with a laugh like a slow leak and a belly that strained cheerfully at the jersey. "Don't stand too close. Last year Hank next door lost an eyebrow."

"Hi, Ray."

"Dessie. Look at you. Look at you! The little mother." He wiped a hand on the apron and held it out. She shook it. His palm was warm, damp, and enormous. "Colleen's been telling me for a month. Told me I had to act surprised. Course I knew the second she hung up the phone. You can't hide a thing like that from a man who's lived with her for six years."

"I wasn't trying to hide it."

"No, no. Of course not. You're a good girl." He winked. "Whole family's proud. The whole block's proud. We had four people from church ask if you'd picked a name."

"Four?"

"Betty from the choir wanted to know if it would be Catholic."

"I haven't—it's twelve weeks, Ray."

"Sure, sure. Plenty of time. I'm just saying, if it's a boy, Raymond's a good strong name. Just throwing it out there." He raised the lid of the pot, peered in, and let it fall with a clang. "Anyways. Go in. Go sit. I'll be five minutes. Bird's got to rest."

She went in, and sat, and was handed a glass of sparkling cider the color of weak tea, and a bowl of mixed nuts, and a throw pillow for her back, and a footstool for her feet, and a plate of cheese and crackers that Colleen kept moving closer by degrees, like a nurse administering a drug. The house hummed with Macy's on the television and the clank of pans and the Thanksgiving smell. Dess closed her eyes and thought, helplessly, This is lovely. This is exactly what it should be.

She let herself have it for an hour and ten minutes.

…

It was over pie that the subject arose.

The table was a long folding thing, covered by two tablecloths, one on top of the other, so the stains showed through. Candles in glass jars. Cornucopia, plastic, shedding. They'd eaten the turkey (which had been, as predicted, superb, and which Ray had attacked with an electric knife and the solemnity of a surgeon) and the stuffing, both kinds, and the green-bean casserole, and a gelatinous cranberry mold in the shape of a can that Colleen made every year because her own mother had. Now the plates had been pushed back. Ray was loosening his belt a notch. Colleen was cutting pecan pie with the concentration of a bomb disposal expert.

"So," said Colleen, in the tone of a woman who has been rehearsing an offhand remark for a week. "How's work?"

"Good."

"Good, good. And the doctor?"

"Everything's fine, Mom. I told you on the phone."

"You did. You did. I just like to hear it." The knife went down. "And the, um. The other thing?"

"What other thing?"

"The family."

Dess's fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

She hadn't told her mother about the memorandum. She hadn't told her mother about the card, either, or about the café, or the receptionist, or the forty thousand dollars. She had told her only that the donor was a young man who'd died in an accident, and that the bank had notified the family, and that there might, at some point, be a gentle inquiry. She'd said it vaguely. She'd said it, she thought, rather well.

"What family?" she said.

"Honey, the boat people."

"How do you—"

"Joelle called me."

"She what?"

"Don't be angry. She was worried. She said, Mrs. Rourke, I don't think Dess is telling you everything, and she said it was an emergency, and she gave me a very sensible argument." Colleen put down the pie server and folded her hands. "She said there'd been a lawyer. She said there'd been some kind of an offer."

"Oh my God."

"She said it was a lot of money."

"Joelle is going to die. I'm going to kill her. I am going to personally bury her under a pile of her own scrubs."

"Dessie."

"I told her not to tell you."

"And she told me anyway, because she loves you, and because she was frightened." Colleen's voice, which had been bright and fluttery all day, had gone suddenly quiet. "Don't be angry at the girl. She did the right thing. She did what I'd have done."

Dess put down her fork. Across the table, Ray had become very interested in the cranberry mold.

"How much?" said Colleen.

"Mom—"

"I'm not asking to be nosy. I'm asking because I want to know what you turned down."

"I didn't turn down anything."

"Honey. I know you. If somebody put a paper in front of you and you didn't sign it, you turned it down. Now how much?"

Dess looked at her.

She saw her mother, small and round and hopeful, in the candlelight, with her gold earrings and her strawberry lipstick, in a reindeer sweater that was slightly too tight across the bust. She saw the lines at the corners of her eyes that had not been there ten years ago. She saw, as she had seen all her life, the enormous vulnerable openness of that face, a face that expected to be hurt, and had chosen, against all the evidence, to keep expecting kindness.

"Two and a half million," she said.

The silence was complete.

Ray's fork clattered onto his plate.

"Million," he said.

"Dollars," said Dess.

"Two and a half—"

"Ray," said Colleen.

"I'm just—Jesus, Colleen—"

"Ray."

He subsided. But his eyes had gone round, and he glanced sidelong at Dess with a look she didn't quite like; an alert, calculating, hungry look, the look of a man who has just heard the exact sound a slot machine makes when it pays out. It was gone in an instant. He picked up his fork again and began to eat his pie with great and elaborate unconcern.

"What did they want?" said Colleen quietly.

"Nothing."

"Honey."

"It was a trust. For the baby. In exchange for—" Dess searched for the words. "For a say. A legal say. In where I live and who looks after it if I die and who gets to decide things. It was a leash, Mom. A gold one."

"But the money would have been the baby's."

"It would have been theirs. Held by a bank they picked."

"But the baby would have had it."

"The baby would have had a mortgage on its mother's freedom."

"That's a lovely phrase," said Colleen. "Did you read it somewhere?"

"I made it up in the shower."

"It's good." Colleen was silent for a moment. Then, carefully, as if testing ice: "Dessie. May I say something? And you'll listen all the way to the end?"

Dess's stomach tightened. "That depends."

"It's not a lecture."

"It's always a lecture."

"This time it's a sort of a question." Colleen drew a breath. "Two and a half million dollars is a lot of money. It is more than I will earn in my life. It is more than you'll earn in yours. And I'm not saying you should take it. I'm not. But I want to understand why you didn't even think about it."

"I did think about it."

"For how long?"

"For—" Dess faltered. "For about fifty-one minutes."

"And at the end of those fifty-one minutes, you tore it up."

"Yes."

"Because of the leash."

"Because of the leash."

"But if they took the leash off—"

"Mom."

"If they took the leash off, and it was just money. Just a gift. No strings. For the baby." Colleen's hands were twisting in her lap. "Would you take it then?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's never just money. It's always the leash. It's the leash in a different coat." Dess pressed her fingers to her temples. "Mom, I work in claims. I've watched a hundred families take a settlement from a rich company. The ones that took it were never the same. They were owned. You take the check and the phone stops ringing. Or it starts ringing at all hours, and you're expected to say thank you. Or you spend the rest of your life waiting for someone to ask for a favor."

"Not everybody's like that."

"Everybody who has two and a half million dollars and wants something is like that."

"You can't know that."

"I know a lot of things."

"You know numbers." Colleen's voice cracked, ever so slightly. "You don't know what it's like to be thirty and alone in a motel in Warwick with a hundred and twelve dollars in your purse and a six-year-old who's learned to say 'It's okay, Mommy, I'm not hungry.'"

Dess's breath stopped.

"Mom."

"No. Let me." Colleen's chin trembled, but she raised it. "I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying it because it's the thing I think about every time I read about somebody winning the lottery. Not the money. The quiet. The idea that for the rest of your life you'd never again have to lie awake counting what's in the account. That a child of yours would never again say I'm not hungry. That's what two and a half million dollars is. It's not a leash. It's a door."

"It's a door with a lock on the outside."

"Maybe. Maybe it is. But you walk through a locked door when your baby's hungry. You don't stand there reading the hinges."

"Mom—"

"I just want to know that you weighed it," said Colleen, wiping her eyes. "That's all. That you looked at what I never had, and you weighed it. And that you didn't say no just because I said yes to too many men."

The words landed in the middle of the table, among the plates and the cranberry mold and the plastic cornucopia, and lay there, bare and terrible and true.

Oh, thought Dess. Oh. That's what she thinks.

…

They did the dishes, because it was the only thing to be done.

Ray had gone out to the garage "to check on the fryer," which was code for a long cigarette and a phone call to his brother Dennis. Colleen stood at the sink with her sleeves pushed up and her gold hoops swinging, scouring the roasting pan with a ferocity that suggested she'd have liked to scrub the memory of the last ten minutes off the surface of the earth. Dess dried. The window above the sink looked out on the back yard, where the propane burner glowed blue in the dusk and Ray's dark shape stood against the fence, his phone a pale smear at his ear.

"I didn't mean it," said Colleen to the pan.

"Yes, you did."

"I meant half of it."

"Which half?"

"The half where I'm a coward who thinks money fixes things." Colleen laughed, wetly. "The other half's the half where I'm your mother and I want to be sure you've thought of everything."

Dess took the pan from her, dried it, and set it on the counter.

"I want to tell you something," she said. "And I need you to hear it all the way to the end."

"That's my line."

"I'm borrowing it."

Colleen turned off the water. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, finger by finger, and leaned back against the counter with her arms folded over the reindeer.

"Go on," she said.

"When I was nine," said Dess, "you took me to Warwick. To Gary's."

"I remember."

"You said, We're going on an adventure, baby. We're going to pack just the important things. You gave me a suitcase. The green one with the broken zipper."

"I remember."

"You said I could take whatever fit. One suitcase. And I stood in my room for an hour, and I tried to decide. I had eleven books, and a hamster named Mr. Pickles, and a bike, and the quilt Grandma made. And I had a shoebox of drawings. And a stuffed rabbit I was too old for." Dess's voice was perfectly level. "I took seven books. I took the quilt. I took a pair of shoes and some underwear. I left the rabbit. I left the bike. I gave Mr. Pickles to the girl next door."

Colleen's face had gone gray.

"And I remember carrying that suitcase up the stairs to Gary's apartment. It was bigger than I was. It bumped on every step. And I remember thinking, very clearly, This is everything. This is everything I own. If anyone told me to go, this is what I'd have to take." She swallowed. "And I remember looking at you, carrying your own bag, in your pretty yellow dress, and thinking: She's smiling. She thinks this time it's going to last."

"Dessie, I—"

"I'm not angry. I'm not. I want you to understand that. I've never once been angry." Her eyes burned. "I just remember how heavy it was. And how I decided, standing on that stair, that nobody would ever make me carry anything I hadn't chosen."

Colleen put her hand over her mouth.

"That's what the two and a half million was," said Dess. "That's what the leash was. It was a suitcase. A very beautiful one, with a gold zipper. But I'd still be climbing the stairs. The baby would still be climbing the stairs. And someday someone would say, pick what you can carry, and we'd have to choose what to leave behind. And I'd rather leave behind every cent than ever, ever, let my child hear that sentence."

"But the money would have meant—"

"It would have meant I'd never have to pack. I know." She set down the dish towel. "But the thing is, Mom—and this is the part I've never said—it was never the suitcase that was heavy. A kid can carry a suitcase. A kid can carry two. It was the person carrying the other one. I wasn't afraid of moving. I was afraid that one day you wouldn't come."

The kitchen was very still.

The clock over the stove ticked. The refrigerator hummed. On the radio on the windowsill, a faint saxophone drifted through a Christmas song that had no business being played before December.

"Oh," whispered Colleen. "Oh, honey."

"You always came," said Dess. "You did. Every time. You were always right behind me on the stairs. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I knew. It was never about you leaving. It was about them. Whoever was at the top. Whoever might say no."

"I should have—"

"You couldn't have. You had a six-year-old and a hundred and twelve dollars." She laughed, shakily. "You had a plan, Mom. It was just a bad one."

Colleen made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. She crossed the kitchen in two steps and put her arms around Dess, hard, pressing her face into her shoulder, and Dess, who was almost a foot taller and who had not been hugged like this since she was twelve, bent down and held on.

They stood in the yellow light for a long time.

"I'll make you a promise," said Dess into her mother's hair. "I'm going to do it differently. I'm going to be the person at the top of the stairs. And whoever comes after—whatever man, or family, or banker—they will be the ones asking to come in. And the baby will never wonder if somebody will be waiting. Never. Not once."

"That's a good plan."

"It's a better plan."

"It's the best plan." Colleen pulled back and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Her mascara had run in two black tracks. "God. Look at me. I'm a mess. You've got to go. You've got to go before I say something else."

"I'm not going anywhere. There's still pie."

"There's so much pie."

"We could have a second helping."

"We could have a third."

They both laughed. Dess took the dish towel and wiped under her mother's eyes, one and then the other, with great gentleness, as one wipes a child.

And that was when she saw, past Colleen's shoulder, through the kitchen window, in the glow of the burner.

Ray, at the fence, with the phone against his ear. He was nodding. His free hand moved as he talked, slowly, rhythmically, in the way of a man writing something on the air. His face, in the light, wore an expression she had never seen on it before: bright, absorbed, alert, like a hound on a scent.

"...Wexcombe," she thought she saw his mouth say. "...Yeah. The boat people. Two and a half. That's what the kid said."

She stared.

"What is it?" said Colleen, turning.

Ray, as if some silent bell had rung, lowered the phone. He turned, and saw them watching through the glass, and his face rearranged itself in a heartbeat into the broad, sheepish, familiar grin of a man caught with a cigarette. He held up a finger. One minute. He mouthed something. Dennis.

"It's his brother," said Colleen fondly. "They never stop. Every holiday. Dennis thinks he's coming into money."

"Does he."

"Oh, he's always thinking it. A scratch ticket. A cousin in Florida. Last year it was a timeshare." She patted Dess's hand. "Don't mind Ray. He's got big ears, but he's got a good heart."

"Mm," said Dess.

She picked up the dish towel.

She told herself she'd imagined it. Nobody could read lips through double-paned glass at thirty feet in the dark. She was tired. She was pregnant. She was emotional, and had just cried in her mother's arms, and was liable to see a villain behind every fence post.

But as she dried the last of the roasting pan she caught Ray's eye through the window once more, and he smiled at her and lifted the phone in a little salute, and she smiled back, and did what she had done all her life when something didn't add up.

She wrote it down.

Not on paper. In her head, on the long invisible page where she kept her columns. Dess gave: one conversation, a lot of truth. Dess received: a mother. And, at the bottom, in small neat letters, a number that did not balance: Ray. Asked about money. Twice.

Outside, the burner clicked off, and the yard went dark.

…

She drove back to Providence at nine, with a foil-wrapped plate of leftovers on the passenger seat and a second foil-wrapped plate in the trunk, and the radio low, and the highway stretching ahead in a long red-white river of taillights and headlamps.

Her phone sat in the cup holder. At the Massachusetts line it buzzed.

She nearly ignored it. Then she saw the number: no name, just the string of digits she'd saved under a label so unobtrusive she'd forgotten it was there.

T.W.

She pulled onto the shoulder.

The text was four lines. She read it under the dome light, with the hazards ticking.

Ms. Rourke. I will not trouble you. I am writing only to wish you a peaceful holiday and to say that you were right about every clause, including the ones I didn't understand until you read them aloud. I should have stopped it. I will not make that mistake again.

Please eat well. I hope the baby kicks.

—T.W.

She read it twice.

Then she sat in the dark, on the shoulder of Route 195, with the hazards flashing amber across the dashboard and the big trucks thundering past, and thought: It's too early for kicking. It's twelve weeks. It's a lime.

She typed, deleted, typed again. Finally she sent:

It's too early for kicking. It's the size of a lime. Don't be a hypochondriac by proxy.

The answer came in under a minute.

I apologize. I am not well versed in the schedule. May I ask when?

She stared at the screen. A truck passed, shaking the car on its springs.

Eighteen to twenty-two weeks, she typed. Probably around the end of February. You'll be the first to know. And then, because her thumbs had never learned the art of stopping: Don't make me regret saying that.

I shall try not to, wrote T.W.

She turned off the hazards.

She did not notice, until she was nearly home, that she had said you'll be the first to know, and that it was the first promise she had made him, and that she'd made it freely.