She hands two-dollar bills to strangers, to people she admires, to people who could use a boost. She has sent five at a time to my mother to distribute. She instructed my mother to give me one when she heard I was driving every which way this summer to visit sons, relatives, friends and to do a Shintaido eval. ‘Tell her not to spend it but to keep it in her purse at all times.’

A very tiny woman with fine tufts of red hair, she graduated with my mother from high school in New Orleans somewhere around 1940. They played in band together. She calls nearly every day, and as my mother has grown less accessible, her friend now talks to me on the phone. She talks of her church in Ohio. But she remembers her days in New Orleans. She remembers going to the Fishermen’s Mass at 2:30 in the morning. She says she doesn’t remember any fishermen, but instead women in ball gowns stopping in after the party was over. In a time where women covered their heads with a veil or hat, these would pin a Kleenex to their hair. She remembers the priest deliberately turning around and facing the church doors to intimidate people from leaving Mass early.

She says she has sent five more two-dollar bills. ‘Maybe your mother will want to give one to her doctor who’s so nice, or to some of the nurses.’

My mother-in-law used to crochet scrubbies, her hands always busy with tulle of yellow, turquoise, red, blue. She distributed scrubbies in much the same way my mother’s friend hands out two-dollar bills. She gave them to the boys ‘to clean your bicycle tires.’ She’d mail them to Texas and tell me to give some to my neighbors, to my mother, to my aunt. A couple years before she died, she gave me a handful in a plastic newspaper sleeve and told me to hide them somewhere where I could come across them at some future date.

I discovered some today in a drawer in my mother’s kitchen.