I found a bank receipt folded inside the torn lining of my late mother’s purse. The balance printed at the bottom was $67 million.
My mother scrubbed office floors at night for 38 years, and the winter my furnace died. She told me she had $300 to her name.
When I took that receipt to the bank, the young teller read the name on the account, turned white as paper, and pressed a button under the counter. Welcome to Kate’s Fortune Stories.
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People think a purse is just a bag. It isn’t.
A woman’s purse is a diary she never writes down. Every receipt, every folded note, every cough drop and safety pin is a sentence from a day you weren’t there for.
When my mother died, I couldn’t open hers for 3 months. I was afraid of what I’d find.
I was right to be afraid. I was just afraid of the wrong thing.
My name is Joan Mercer. Everyone calls me Joe.
I’m 54 years old and I live in the lower half of a green duplex in Duluth, Minnesota up the hill from Lake Superior. For 22 years, I have driven a yellow school bus for the Duluth Public Schools, Route 14, 41 stops, and a little boy named Matteo, who has told me a knock-knock joke every single morning since the second grade.
My mother’s name was Dolores Mercer. To the whole world, she was Dolly.
She was 80 years old when she died last August, alone in her recliner in her one-bedroom apartment on East Fourth Street, with a television on and her old brown purse sitting on her lap, both hands resting on top of it the way she always held it. The doctor said her heart simply stopped.
My mother cleaned offices nights for 38 years. She cleaned the Harbor Light building on Superior Street.
She started at 6:00 in the evening and finished at 2:00 in the morning. She took the city bus home in the dark.
She did it the week my father died. My father was Eddie Mercer.
He was a deck hand on an iron ore freighter called the Cyrus J. Holloway. And in November of 1977, a storm came across the lake so fast the weather service couldn’t warn anyone.
The Holloway went down off the Keweenaw Peninsula with 19 men aboard. They never found my father.
I was 5 years old. My brother Ray was two.
The union paid my mother a death benefit of $6,000 and that was it. That was everything she got for her husband.
So, we were poor. I say it because everything that happens in this story depends on you understanding just how poor.
My mother bought our coats at St. Vincent de Paul. She kept a coffee can on top of the refrigerator labeled emergencies.
And I don’t think there was ever more than $40 in it. When I was grown, it didn’t get better for her.
It got quieter. She went deaf in her left ear in her 60s.
And the audiologist told her a good pair of hearing aids would cost $4,200. She laughed and said, “I hear what I need to hear.”
For 15 years, she turned her head to the right whenever anyone spoke to her, and she pretended that was just a habit. And then there was my daughter, Lily.
Lily was accepted into the nursing program at the University of Minnesota when she was 18. But I was a divorced bus driver and the financial aid letter left a gap of $19,000 a year.
I sat at my mother’s kitchen table and cried. My mother held my hand and said, “Honey, if I had it, it would be yours.
You know that I have nothing.” Lily went to community college instead.
She worked nights at a nursing home. It took her 8 years to finish her degree.
And she still owes $41,000 in loans. That was our family.
Hard work, stubborn, always one broken furnace away from disaster. There’s one more person you need to know about before I open that purse.
My little brother, Ray. Ray was the charming one.
He had my father’s smile and none of my mother’s caution. He moved to Fort Myers, Florida when he was 23 and he never really came back.
