I did not drive to the farm. I drove as fast as a seventy nine year old woman in a Buick can go, which was forty one miles an hour, with my coat still buttoned wrong and my mother letter crumpled in my fist. By the time I swung into my own lane, Gary pickup was nosed against the porch steps with the tailgate down. He and Sharon son Evan had my mother cedar chest between them and were angling it up over the lip of the truck bed. Across the road, Mrs. King had backed her John Deere tractor onto the end of my driveway and cut the engine. She was sitting in the seat with her arms folded, like a sheriff.
“Gary, put it down,” I said. He turned around with a charming, practiced smile. “Edna, we are only moving it for safekeeping,” he said. “Sharon thought it was getting wet in the house.” I said the house had been dry for two hundred years. He tried again. He said an appraiser from Lancaster wanted to look at it, that old chests like this brought money, that it was just good sense. I stood in front of the tailgate in my wedding dress apron and I said, in a voice that had called twelve hundred brides to the fitting room, “Put. It. Down.”
They set it on the lawn. Evan would not meet my eyes. Sharon came up the lane behind me in her little white car, and she got out slowly, with her purse over her shoulder, and walked across the grass like a woman going to a church supper. I told her to sit down on the porch swing. Then I knelt on the lawn, with Mrs. King walking over from her tractor to hold my elbow, and I felt along the inside of the chest. Mama had said, the false bottom. I pressed the left corner and a thin plank of cedar lifted out in my hand like a lid.
A cedar chest rolled toward a pickup truck, a letter named a father, and a mothers advice finally came true at the bottom of a jar.
Underneath lay a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, tied with a blue ribbon. Inside was a passbook from the Keystone Savings Bank of Philadelphia, a bank letter, and a photograph of a tall young man in a work shirt, standing in front of a barn with a sack of feed on his shoulder. I knew his face. I had seen it in the bathroom mirror every day of my life, the long jaw, the deep set eyes. On the back, in German, someone had written a line. I could not read it, but Sharon, who studied German in high school, leaned over and translated it, whispering. For my daughter Edna, who I never held.
The passbook balance was four hundred and sixty one thousand dollars. It had grown for forty two years, untouched, in the name of Edna Stoltzfus Reiner. The bank letter was from Johann Weber estate, a lawyer in Stuttgart, dated 1983, saying that the money was a gift from a man who had loved her mother and had never been allowed to love her. I sat on the grass and read it twice. I thought of Lloyd, who had loved me for fifty four years and never once said a word. And then I understood that Lloyd had known. He had always known. He had simply decided it did not matter.
Sharon was weeping on the porch swing. “Mom, I did not know,” she said. “I swear to God. Gary told me Grandma was a hoarder, that it was all junk, that he would handle it. He said we were only selling a few things.” I asked her who had told Bernie to buy the jar. She did not answer. After a long while she said, in a very small voice, “Gary owes forty thousand dollars. He lost it on a swimming pool franchise in Florida. I knew he was in trouble. I just did not want to know how much.” I said that was the oldest sin in Lancaster County.
Gary left that afternoon, with his shirt untucked. I did not call the sheriff. I called my lawyer in Lititz, a kind young man named Eli Yoder whose mother I had made a wedding dress for in 1985, and by the end of the week every account I owned was in a trust that could not be touched by anyone but me and a woman I trusted. Evan stayed. He was twenty two, and he had the long hands of his great grandmother. I put a pincushion in his palm and told him that if he wanted to learn to hem a gown, he could start on Saturday.
I drove back to the antique mall in the Buick and bought my mother jar from Bernie Fass for eighty five dollars. He insisted on returning the money, and then, a moment later, on giving me a dozen more buttons from a coat he had found in an estate. “Mrs. Reiner, I would rather lose the sale,” he said. I told him he had saved my life by not putting the coins in a drawer. He turned bright red and put his hands in his pockets, and I carried the jar home against my chest the way I once carried Sharon.
On the first rainy Sunday in November, Sharon came to the farmhouse alone. She sat at the kitchen table without being asked. I set the jar between us, took off the zinc lid, and turned it over. Four thousand buttons ran out across the oilcloth, mother of pearl and brass and bone, clinking and rolling in the lamplight. Mama had said, all the way to the bottom. There, caught in the zinc, was one last button, wooden, worn smooth, with a bit of green thread still through the holes. It was the toggle from my father barn coat. The one who raised me. I held it up.
“Sort them by color,” I said. “The way Mama taught me.” Sharon looked at me for a long moment. Then, without a word, she rolled up her sleeves. We worked side by side while the rain came down on the tin roof, and neither of us said anything for the first hour. Somewhere around the blues, she began to hum a hymn I had not heard in thirty years. I joined in. When the table was covered in tidy piles, she looked up with wet eyes and said, “Mom, how many do you think there are?” I said, “Enough.”