Mom. You already know.
Four words in ballpoint under my name, and I sat in the dirt in my own backyard with a zip-lock bag in my hand for a good while before I could open it.
Inside was a letter and two pieces of paper from Mercy Health in Springfield.
The top one was a statement. Account closed, balance zero, paid in full on the twenty-second of April.
In 2019 I had my gallbladder out and then an infection and eleven days in that hospital, and when it was all over I owed nineteen thousand four hundred dollars on a Shoney’s pension and Social Security. I set up a payment plan I was never going to finish. I was sixty-eight years old and I had made peace with dying owing that hospital money and I never told my boys one word about it.
The second paper was the payment history. Seventy-one payments. One hundred eighty dollars a month, then two-forty when he could, going back to October of 2019, every one of them on time.
Not one of them from me.
His letter is a page and a half and it is not sentimental, because Curtis was not a sentimental man.
Mom — I called the billing office in 2019 and asked what you owed and they told me and I told them to send it to my address. It’s done as of April. Don’t be mad and don’t tell Denny and Ray because they’d feel bad and there wasn’t anything for them to do. I’ve been short since the plant cut us back to four days, which is why you got a two-dollar plant, and I could not stand there and hand you a two-dollar plant and explain all this out loud in your kitchen. So I’m putting it under the dirt where you’ll find it when you get around to it. You already know why I did it. You worked eleven years of dinner shifts. — Curtis
You already know why I did it.
He came in my back door on Mother’s Day with a marked-down plant under his arm and he was awkward about it and I told him it was fine and I let him think I was disappointed, and I was, and he saw it, because that boy could read me from across a room since he was four years old.
He had made his last payment eighteen days before.
Five weeks later he was gone on a Wednesday morning on Route 68 and he was forty-four years old.
I called Mercy on a Monday in September to be sure it was real. A young woman put me on hold and came back and said, ma’am, you don’t owe us anything, and I said I know, I just needed to hear somebody say it out loud.
I told his brothers at Thanksgiving. He’d said not to and I did it anyway, because he was wrong about that one thing and I am his mother.
That plant is on my kitchen windowsill in a red clay pot. It came back. It’s got new growth all up one side and I have quit calling it half-dead in front of company.