Kevin turned the white envelope over in his hands once more, and then he did something that I will remember for the rest of my days. He did not open it. He looked at the corner, at the logo, a little red barn with a sun over it, and his whole face changed. “Maxine,” he said, “my mother has sent me a birthday card every year for eleven years. It always has a cardinal on a fence post. There is a little M in the corner. She buys them at Walmart.” His voice was barely there. “Is that you? Did you paint my birthday cards?”
I said I had painted every one. Diane made a noise. She picked up the brochure from the table and put it down again and then picked it up. “Mom, what are you saying? You sold greeting cards at a church bazaar.” I opened the envelope myself, then. I took out the first page and laid it in front of Kevin and turned it so he could read the number. Five million, four hundred thousand dollars. For twelve hundred paintings, forty years of work, bought by the company that put my cardinals in every store in the country, under the name Maxine Cardinals, on the back of the card, in small gold letters.
Diane did not move. Kevin read the page. He read it again. “Five point four million,” he said, quite softly. And then Kevin looked at his wife, a long look, with something dawning in it. “Diane,” he said. “The credit cards. The boat. You said you got a bonus.” Diane said, “Kevin, not now.” I said, “It is a good time, honey.” I laid the insurance printout on the table, the policy of Harold, paid in full, one hundred thousand dollars, to an account ending in 3390. “I asked the agent whose name is on that account, Diane. It is yours.”
A greeting card company envelope was turned over in the hands of a son in law and gave one grandmother the evening to bring her daughter back to the table.
Diane burst into tears, which is what she has done since she was four. She said she had only meant to borrow. She said the credit cards had been out of control and Kevin did not know, and she was going to put it back, and I would never have missed it, because I was getting along fine with my little cards. “I was going to tell you, Mom.” I said, “You told me it lapsed. You watched me cry for a week.” That was the part that finally reached her. She stopped sobbing and put both hands flat on the table and stared at them, and said, in a voice I did not recognize, “Yes. I did.”
Kevin stood. He took his coat off the back of the chair and laid it over his arm, and he said, “Maxine, I did not know. I swear on my mother.” I believed him. He said, “Tell me what you need.” I said I needed him to call his mother. He looked confused. “Call her, Kevin. Tell her you are looking at the woman who painted her cards. She wrote a fan letter to the company, and they forwarded it to me. I never answered. I thought nobody could mean it.” He took out his phone with unsteady hands.
He called from the kitchen. I heard Betty answer, loud and glad, from two states away, and then I heard Kevin say, “Mom, I am sitting with the cardinal lady.” There was a silence on the line. Then a sound I had not heard from a grown woman in years, a sort of whoop, and then the tinny voice of Betty on the speaker saying, “Put her on. Put her on this minute.” I took the phone. “Maxine?” she said. “I have your card on my refrigerator. I have every one. I have been waiting eleven years to say thank you.” I looked at my daughter, still at the table, and I understood how much thanks I had spent my life not collecting.
So I told them what would happen, there at the table, with the furnace clicking on and the train blowing its whistle by the river. Diane would return the hundred thousand dollars, every cent, with interest. The boat would be sold on Monday. The credit cards would be paid out of the salary of Kevin, not mine, and Diane would go back to work at the dental office, the one she left because she said it was beneath her. I would sign nothing. I would not move to Sergeant Bluff. And by the end of the month, I would be in a house of my own, on the bluff, with a north window and a room for my paints.
Diane was crying again, but differently now. She came around the table and knelt on the linoleum beside my chair and put her head in my lap, as she did at six, when she had a fever. “Mom,” she said, “I was so scared of being poor. When Daddy passed, I looked at the bills, and I thought, we are going to lose everything.” I stroked her hair. “You were never poor,” I said. “You were afraid. There is a difference, honey. You had a mother and a father who loved you.”
I bought the house on Jackson Street in March. A little yellow bungalow with a porch swing and a window that faces north, the best light for watercolor. I painted my first card in the new studio on a Tuesday morning, a cardinal on a snowy fence post, and I signed it with the little M, and I sat for a long time looking at it. Then I painted a second card, and a third. By Christmas I had made three hundred, by hand, the way I always had, and this year I mailed one to everyone I had ever met. Including the mother of Kevin, Betty, in Nebraska.
Diane came for dinner every Sunday. She paid back the insurance money in monthly installments, by check, because she insisted on a check. With the last one, she handed me an envelope with a cardinal drawn on the front in ballpoint pen, clumsy, like a child drawing, with a little M in the corner. Inside were the words, I am sorry, Mom. And one dollar bill. The dollar, she explained, was the first thing she ever earned, babysitting at twelve, and she had kept it in her jewelry box. I framed the card. It hangs above my paint table, next to a watercolor of a cardinal, and the two look surprisingly good together.