My Sister-In-Law Took Everything “Of Value” From Mom’s House And Left Me The “Junk Jar” Of Buttons. Two Weeks Later She Was Begging Me For What Was Inside

My mother died in her sleep on the ninth of September, ninety years old, in the same yellow house on Tulip Lane where I learned to ride a bike. I live three hours away in Louisville. My brother Werner and his wife, Suzette, live eleven minutes from that house. I know it’s eleven because Suzette mentioned it at the funeral luncheon, twice, while explaining why it made sense for her to “handle things.”

“You’ve got your job, Tommie,” she said. “And the drive. Let me take that off your plate. I’m good at this.”

She is good at it. I’ll give her that. Suzette is sixty-two and sells real estate, and she can empty a house faster than anyone I have ever seen. She had an estate company in there before the flowers from the funeral had died. By the time I got a long weekend off from the credit union and drove up in early October, the house was a shell.

The dining room set was gone. Mom’s good silver was gone, and the cut-glass punch bowl, and the cabinet of little porcelain figurines she dusted every Saturday of my life. The mantel clock was gone. The jewelry box from her dresser was gone. Even the tablecloths.

On the porch, by the door, there was one cardboard box with my name on it in black marker.

Inside was my mother’s flowered apron, a cookbook from the Methodist women’s circle with half the pages loose, and a big glass canning jar, the half-gallon kind, full to the lid with buttons.

On top was a sticky note in Suzette’s handwriting.

Tommie, saved you the junk jar since you always loved playing with it as a kid. Everything of value has been handled. S.

I walked through the house anyway. I don’t know what I expected. My footsteps sounded wrong on the bare floors, too loud, like the house had been turned up. There were pale squares on the wallpaper where the pictures had hung, and four dents in the dining room carpet where the table legs had stood for fifty-one years. In the kitchen, somebody had left the radio on the windowsill because it was too old to sell, and it was still tuned to the farm report.

The sewing closet was the last door at the end of the hall. The shelves were bare. The old Singer was gone, and the basket of mending, and the tin of pins shaped like a tomato. On the top shelf, in the dust, there was a perfect clean circle where the jar had sat for longer than I’d been alive.

I stood there and looked at that circle for a long time. Then I went out to the porch, picked up my one box, and sat on the steps with it in my lap like a kid waiting for a ride.

The Junk Jar

I want to explain about the jar, because you might think I should have been insulted, and I was, but not for the reason you’d expect.

That jar sat on the top shelf of my mother’s sewing closet for as long as I can remember. When we were small and it rained, she would take it down and pour it out on the kitchen table, and Werner and I would sort the buttons for hours. By color. By size. By how many holes. Werner always made armies out of the brass ones. I made families.

My mother never threw a coat away without cutting the buttons off first. Not a shirt, not a dress, not a pair of pajamas. “You never throw away a good button,” she’d say, and she’d snip them off with the little stork scissors and drop them in, and the jar kept filling, year after year, like a rain gauge.

So I wasn’t insulted that Suzette gave me the jar. I was insulted that she called it junk. And I was insulted by the word “handled,” which is a word for luggage.

I called Werner from the porch.

“Did you know she sold the jewelry box?” I asked.

“She said it was mostly costume,” he said. Werner is sixty-seven, a retired mail carrier, and he has been agreeing with his wife since 1986. “There was a dealer from out by the interstate. Stenberg. He gave her four hundred for the lot.”

“Four hundred dollars for Mom’s whole dresser?”

“Tommie,” he said, and he sounded so tired that I let it go. “It’s done. Take the jar. Mom would want you to have it.”

I took the jar.

Weston’s Letter

Two days after I got home, I got a letter from my nephew.

Weston is Werner and Suzette’s son, nineteen years old, and he enlisted in the Army in the spring. Nobody in the family saw it coming. He’d done a year at community college and hated it, and one day he came home and said he’d signed up, and Suzette cried for a week. He was finishing his training in Georgia that fall. He called home on Sundays. Suzette told everyone at church what he’d eaten that week, which was mostly eggs.

He wrote me on actual paper, which I loved, because nobody under forty does that anymore.

Aunt Tommie, he wrote. The Legion post back home is doing those banners on Main Street for Veterans Day, the ones with the old photos. Grandpa Sylvester is getting one. They asked me to come in my uniform for the ceremony and hold Grandpa’s Bronze Star for the newspaper picture, since I’m the first one in the family to serve since him. I get leave that weekend. Mom says she’s taking care of it. I just wanted you to know because you’re the one who always told me stories about him.

I read that letter at my kitchen table three times.

My father was in Vietnam in 1968. He came home with a Bronze Star and never once talked about why. He worked thirty-four years at the transmission plant, coached Little League, grew tomatoes the size of softballs, and if you asked him about the war he’d say, “I was there, and now I’m here,” and go get you a popsicle.

He died in 2009. I hadn’t thought about the medal in years. I assumed it was in Mom’s jewelry box.

Which meant it had gone to a man named Stenberg for four hundred dollars, along with a lot of costume pearls.

The Phone Call

Suzette called me on the twenty-second of October at nine o’clock at night. I knew it was bad because she didn’t say hello.

“Where is it?” she said.

“Where’s what?”

“Don’t do that, Tommie. Dad’s medal. The Bronze Star. Weston needs it for the Legion thing on the eleventh, and it wasn’t in the jewelry box.”

“How do you know it wasn’t in the jewelry box?”

There was a pause. “Because I drove out to Stenberg’s this afternoon and made him go through every drawer, and it isn’t there, and he swears it was never there. So I’m asking you nicely. Did you take it the weekend of the funeral?”

I had been in my mother’s house for a total of six hours the weekend of the funeral, and four of those I’d spent on the phone with the funeral home about the wrong hymn in the program.

“I did not take it,” I said.

“You were always his favorite,” she said. “Everybody knows it. If anybody was going to slip it in a pocket, it would be you.”

I’m sixty-four years old. I have managed a credit union branch for twenty-six years. I have been accused of things by people who were screaming at me through a drive-thru window, and I have stayed polite. But I felt something hot climb my neck when she said that.

“Suzette,” I said, “you had that house for a month before I set foot in it. You handled everything of value. Your words. If the medal is gone, it went on your watch.”

She hung up on me.

I sat there. Then I did what I always do when I’m too angry to sleep. I went to find something to sort.

Sorting by Lamplight

The jar was on my counter where I’d left it. I took it to the kitchen table, put a towel down so the buttons wouldn’t roll off, turned the jar on its side, and let them pour.

You’d be surprised what a jar of buttons can hold. It was like dumping out sixty years.

Right away I found the red ones. Six big round red buttons with a gold rim, from the Christmas coat Mom bought me in 1969 at the department store downtown. I was seven. I’d begged for that coat for a month. I could still feel the scratchy collar.

Then the tortoiseshell ones from her good church coat, the camel one she wore every Easter. Tiny pearl buttons off my grandmother’s blouse. Navy buttons with anchors from Werner’s peacoat in high school, when he thought he was the toughest boy in Howard County. Little white plastic ones shaped like ducks, from my pajamas. Brass ones with eagles from Dad’s Army dress coat. Werner’s armies.

And at the bottom of the pile, there was a set of six tiny white buttons, no bigger than aspirin, still threaded together on a loop of blue thread.

I knew those. I’d been in the church the day they were worn. They came off the little white suit Weston wore when he was baptized, nineteen years ago that June. Suzette had made a big fuss about the suit. She’d ordered it from a catalog. When Weston outgrew it, apparently Mom had done what Mom did.

I was holding the baptism buttons, thinking about how my sister-in-law had boxed up her own son’s baby buttons and called them junk, when I put my other hand into the last of the pile and felt something with points.

I pulled it out by the ribbon.

It was a bronze star. Five points, a smaller star in the middle. The ribbon was red with a thin blue stripe down the center, edged in white, faded on one side like it had sat near a window. It had been in the jar so long that a brass button had pressed a perfect little circle into the ribbon.

I sat at my kitchen table at eleven o’clock at night and laughed until I cried. Because of course. Of course that’s where she’d put it.

Why a Button Jar

I called Werner in the morning. Not Suzette. Werner.

“I found it,” I said.

He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “Where?”

“In the junk jar. At the bottom. With your anchor buttons.”

I heard him put the phone down on something and pick it back up.

“Tommie,” he said. “I think I knew that. I think I knew it and forgot.”

He told me something I’d never heard. When Werner was about fifteen, he found the medal in the box in Dad’s closet and pinned it on his shirt to show his friends. Dad came home from the plant and saw it. He didn’t yell. He just went white, took it off Werner’s shirt very gently, and handed it to Mom.

“Put it somewhere I won’t run across it, Freddie,” he said.

Mom asked him where.

And Dad said, “A medal’s just a button for a coat you can’t take off. Put it with the buttons.”

Werner said he’d remembered that sentence his whole life without ever thinking it was literal.

“She did exactly what he asked,” I said. “She put it in the one place he’d never look and the rest of us looked every week.”

“Suzette’s been sick about this,” Werner said. “She’s been calling everybody. She called the Legion and told them it might be lost. She’s been up nights.”

“She called me a thief,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I know she did.”

“I’ll bring it for the ceremony,” I said. “I’ll put it in Weston’s hands myself.”

“You don’t want to just mail it to Suzette?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

Main Street on the Eleventh

The ceremony was at ten in the morning in the parking lot behind the American Legion hall, where they’d set up folding chairs and a podium with bunting on it. Thirty-one banners were going up along Main Street that day. My father’s was number fourteen. They’d used the picture of him at twenty-two in his uniform, squinting, with a cigarette he would have hated for his grandchildren to see.

I got there early. Suzette got there earlier.

She was standing by her car in a camel coat with her arms crossed, and when she saw me walk across the lot she came straight at me.

“Werner says you have it,” she said.

“I do.”

“Give it to me. I’m his mother. I’ll hand it to him.”

I want to tell you I was gracious. I was mostly gracious. But she had called me a thief on the phone, and she had stuck a sticky note on a box, and I had driven three hours on the interstate thinking about the word “handled.”

“You told me there was nothing of value in that jar,” I said. “I took you at your word. So I’ll hand him this myself, and you can stand right next to me.”

Her face did several things at once.

“Where was it?” she said finally.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. Inside it were the six tiny white buttons on their loop of blue thread.

“It was in the junk jar,” I said. “Right underneath these.”

She looked at them for a long time before she understood. I watched her understand. Her hand came up to her mouth.

“Those are from his baptism suit,” she said.

“Mom kept them. She kept all of it. Yours too. There are three gray buttons in there from that blazer you wore to the Christmas Eve service in 2004. I recognized them.”

Suzette is not a crier. I have seen her stay dry-eyed through a closing where the buyer’s financing fell apart at the table. She stood in the Legion parking lot in her camel coat and cried with her whole face, holding a sandwich bag of baby buttons.

“I didn’t look,” she said. “I didn’t even open the lid. I thought it was junk.”

“I know,” I said, and I put my arm around her, because she was my brother’s wife and my nephew’s mother and it was a cold morning. “That’s what Mom was counting on. For fifty years, nobody looked.”

What Weston Held

Weston came across the lot in his dress uniform at nine-forty, and I swear he’d grown two inches since spring. His haircut made his ears stick out. He looked so much like the picture on banner fourteen that I had to stop walking for a second.

“Aunt Tommie,” he said. “Mom said it was lost.”

“It was,” I said. “For about fifty years. Then it turned up.”

I gave it to him the way my father would have, without a speech. I just put it in his palm and closed his fingers over it.

He looked at the ribbon. He ran his thumb over the little round dent where the brass button had pressed into it.

“What’s this mark?”

“That’s from one of his coat buttons,” I said. “Your grandpa told your grandma to put it with the buttons, so she did. It’s been sitting with his Army coat buttons since before your dad could drive.”

I gave him one more thing out of my pocket. One brass eagle button from Dad’s dress coat. “And that’s from the coat itself. Keep it in your pocket. Don’t let your sergeant see.”

He laughed, and his eyes were wet, and then the Legion commander called the families up and he went and stood under banner fourteen and held his grandfather’s medal for the newspaper photographer with both hands, the way you hold something that might fly away.

Suzette stood on one side of him. I stood on the other. Werner took a picture with his phone and cut all our heads off, which is very Werner.

Four Hundred Dollars

Here’s the bite, if you want one.

On the way out, Suzette asked me, very quietly, what else was in the jar.

I told her. The Easter coat buttons. The duck pajama buttons. The peacoat anchors. My grandmother’s pearl buttons, which turned out to be real mother-of-pearl, the old kind. And six heavy silver buttons from a coat of Grandpa Ziegler’s that I’d never seen in my life, sterling, with a little hallmark on the back.

“Real silver?” she said.

“Real silver,” I said. “So it turns out the junk jar was worth more than the jewelry box. But I’m not going to sell them. I’m going to sew them onto something.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she laughed. Really laughed, the first time I’d heard her laugh since the funeral.

“Four hundred dollars,” she said. “I let that man walk off with Mom’s dresser for four hundred dollars and I gave you the silver for free.”

“You handled it,” I said.

She deserved that one. She took it like a good sport. She said, “Okay. I earned that.”

Thanksgiving

The jar sits on my kitchen counter now, in Louisville, where the light hits it in the afternoon. I keep it about three-quarters full.

At Thanksgiving, Werner and Suzette drove down, and Weston came on leave, and after dinner Suzette asked, a little shyly, if we could pour it out. So we did. We put a towel on my table and tipped it over and the four of us sorted buttons for two hours like it was raining outside. Werner made armies out of the brass ones. I made families. Suzette found the gray buttons from her 2004 blazer and held them up and said, “Your mother kept these? I didn’t even like that blazer,” and laughed so hard she had to take her glasses off.

Weston asked if he could have the baptism buttons. Suzette said yes before I could.

Before they left, Suzette took a pair of scissors out of my drawer and cut the top button off the cardigan she was wearing, a plain little brown one, and dropped it in the jar.

“For the next fifty years,” she said. “So somebody knows I was here.”

I didn’t say anything. I just put the lid back on.

Is there a jar, a drawer or a shoebox in your family that everybody walks past? Go open it this week. And if this story reminded you of someone, share it with them.

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