“Pastor Reid, they are writing to me because they bought my choir robe designs,” I said, and I opened the white envelope on the kitchen table, on top of the china. “Ten weeks ago, they paid me four million, two hundred thousand dollars for the pattern my mother taught me in Orangeburg.” Outside, the bells of Bethel were still ringing. “The Heritage Choir Robe will be in every church catalog in the country by spring.” Pastor Reid read the first page, and the second, and then he looked at Curtis, and I saw him decide, in that instant, which side of the table he was sitting on.
Curtis laughed, but it was a thin laugh, dry as paper. “Mama, I am glad for you,” he said, “but you do not understand contracts. Let me look it over.” “I understand them well enough,” I said. “I understand the one you signed with the church, calling yourself the owner of my house. I understand fifteen hundred dollars a month, for thirty six months, in your name. I understand that my wedding china was never in storage.” I laid the copy of the church rent checks beside the envelope. “Fifty four thousand dollars, son. And you told me the church had bought it with cash.” Curtis went gray around the mouth.
Monica pushed the brochure into the middle of the table, as if it burned her fingers. She is a nurse practitioner, a short, round woman with a laugh that fills a room, and for once the room was silent. “Curtis,” she said. “The money for the boat. You told me it was from the insurance of your father.” Curtis opened his mouth. “Do not say a word,” said Monica, in a voice I had never heard from her. She turned to me, and her eyes were full. “Mother Ellison, I did not know. I swear, I thought the house was sold. I would never have asked you to move.” I believed her.
A wedding china cup set beside an envelope gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the porch in Columbia.
I told them my terms with my hands folded on the white envelope. The house on Two Notch Road was mine, and the deed would be returned to my name by the end of the month. Pastor Reid and his wife would keep the house on a fair ten year lease, and I would move into the apartment over the garage, where Junior once kept his tools and where I would put my sewing table by the window. Curtis would repay the fifty four thousand dollars in monthly payments, and he would return every piece of my wedding china by Saturday morning. And the next time my son wished to speak about my house, he would knock on the front door.
Pastor Reid spoke at last. He is a young man with a soft beard, and he took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “Mother Ellison, the trustees and I will draft the new lease tonight,” he said. “And I want you to know that I will say something from the pulpit on Sunday.” “Please do not use his name,” I said. “He is still my son.” Pastor Reid nodded slowly. “I will not use his name,” he said. “But I will say a word about honoring mothers.” On Sunday, he preached on the fifth commandment, and I watched Curtis in the back pew, folding and unfolding his bulletin.
On Saturday morning, the doorbell rang at nine. Curtis stood on the porch, with eight boxes at his feet and a pickup truck at the curb. He did not speak. He carried the boxes into the dining room one by one, unwrapped each plate, each saucer, each teacup, and set them out on the sideboard in the same pattern as the day the mother of Junior gave them to us. He stood back. “Mama, I have been ashamed since Tuesday,” he said. “I do not ask you to forgive me. I only ask you to let me carry the last box.” I let him. It was the heaviest one.
That Sunday, the Bethel choir walked in wearing new robes of purple and gold. Sister Angela, the wife of the pastor, had organized the whole thing, and every robe carried my embroidered stole, with a cross and a dove. As they processed down the aisle, singing “Fly Away,” the congregation rose, and the old mothers on the front pew began to clap. A deacon whispered, “Those are Bernice robes.” I sat there in my own purple suit and cried like a girl. Behind me, Sister Angela laid a hand on my shoulder, and said into my ear, “Welcome home, Mother Ellison. This time, for good.”
The money consequences were firm. Curtis sold the boat and a second set of golf clubs, and he took a part time job as a night security guard at the state office complex. Monica paid down her own student loans and set the rest aside. The first payment arrived on the first of the month, in a plain envelope pushed through my mail slot, and every month thereafter, there was a new one. In the fall, he enclosed a photograph of the empty boat slip at the lake with a note that read, I do not miss it. I finally know what I was missing.
In the name of Junior, who passed in the winter of 2012 and who built that house with his own hands, I started the Junior Fund. It buys choir robes, hymnals and a small stipend for the pianist in country churches in Richland County that cannot afford them. In the first year, we outfitted nineteen choirs. A church of eleven members, in a wooden building at the end of a gravel road, put on their new robes on the first Sunday of Advent, and the choir director, a woman of eighty, wept as she zipped the last one.
On a golden evening in October, I sat on the steps of my garage apartment, under my own pecan tree, in a rocking chair with a cushion that Monica had sewn. A pie sat on the rail. A breeze moved the leaves. The pastor and his wife were sitting on the main porch with the church mothers, laughing, and a sewing machine hummed in my window behind me. Curtis came up the walk with a bag of groceries, climbed the steps, and set down the bag. “Mama, may I sit?” he asked. I patted the step beside me, and he sat, and we watched the sun go down behind Bethel.
