Nana's Envelopes

We were clearing the house in Drumcondra when I found the tin. Jacob's Cream Crackers, the old blue one, up on the wardrobe under a folded blanket. Inside were nine brown envelopes, soft as cloth from handling, each one labelled in Nana's capitals. RENT. ESB. COAL. MESSAGES. SHOES. MASS. CHRISTMAS. DOCTOR. And one that just said ME. My sister Aoife came in and saw me sitting on the bed with them. "Is that money?" "A bit. Not much. Look at the dates." The ESB envelope had a fiver in it, one of the old green ones with the woman on it. The RENT one was empty but had a note inside in biro: paid 3 Nov, Mr Keogh, receipt in drawer. The MESSAGES one, which was groceries, had a list. Butter, rashers, Bisto, Silvermints for your grandad. This is how she ran it. Every Thursday Grandad's wages came home in a packet and she'd sit at the kitchen table and divide it up. Rent first, always. Then the light. Then coal in winter. What was left went into MESSAGES and if there was anything after that it went into SHOES, because there were five children and children are made mostly of feet. She never had a bank account until 1988. She didn't trust them. "The bank knows what you have," she used to say, "and once they know, they'll want it." Aoife took the CHRISTMAS envelope and opened it. Empty. Of course it was empty, it was March when she died. She'd have started filling it in August. "Do you remember the ME one?" I said. "No. What was in it?" I showed her. Two pounds. A receipt from Clerys for a scarf, 1993. And a Mass card for Grandad, the little folded kind. Aoife didn't say anything for a while. I'm thirty-eight and I've got a spreadsheet with fourteen tabs and two apps that round up my card purchases and I'd never, not once, kept anything back with my own name on it. Every euro I have is spoken for by something sensible. It's a good system. The numbers are good.

"We should keep these," Aoife said. "We should." I've got them in my flat now, in the same tin, on top of the fridge. And this is going to sound daft but I went to the credit union the week after and opened a second account. Small. Twenty a week, standing order. I've told nobody what it's for and I've put nothing in the memo field. I know exactly what she'd say. She'd say the bank knows now. And I'd say yeah, Nana, but they don't know what it's for.