The Call
Daddy called me on a Tuesday, which should have told me something, because Daddy was a Sunday caller. Ever since I was thirteen, I had gotten his voice on Sundays, after church, with a ballgame going behind it and a question about whether I’d changed the oil in my car. So when his name lit up my phone in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, I walked out of a budget meeting and into the stairwell, and my heart was already going before I answered.
“Don’t make a fuss,” he said. “I’m at Holy Cross. They want to keep me a couple of days.”
A couple of days became a scan, and the scan became a doctor with kind, tired eyes who said the word metastasized the way you set down something that might break. Colon cancer, and now the liver too. Months, not years, for a man who was only forty-six. Daddy said, “Well,” and looked up at the ceiling tiles like they owed him an explanation.
I got to the hospital in forty minutes that should have taken seventy. When I reached Room 412, the door was open and my mother was sitting in the chair by the window.
She still had her coat on. Her church purse sat on her knees, a thermos stood at her feet, and she held a yellow legal pad against her chest like a hymnal. Daddy was asleep with his mouth a little open, the way he used to sleep on the couch my whole childhood.
I stopped in the doorway. “Mama?”
“Shh.” She lifted one finger. Then, quieter: “Bernice called me.”
“Aunt Bernice called you.”
“Somebody had to tell somebody. He wasn’t going to.”
My parents had met at sixteen, in the same homeroom, and had me at eighteen, so for most of my life they were closer to the big kids on the block than to the grown-ups in charge. They had been divorced for fifteen years and three months. The word had settled into our family like a piece of furniture, and I knew its dimensions in the dark. He moved out the spring I turned thirteen, with a duffel bag and the good recliner and a grudge I never fully understood. She kept the house, the dog, and the last name, and in all those years she never said one bad word about him in front of me, which I had come to suspect was its own kind of accusation. When they had to be in the same room, at a funeral or a wedding, it went the same way every time. “Ray.” “Loretta.” Two words, like a handshake neither of them wanted to be the first to let go of.
Now she was in his hospital room with her coat on.
“Mama, you don’t have to be here.”
She looked at me over the top of her glasses, the look that had gotten me through every math test I ever took. “Did I ask you what I had to do?” Then she tore a page off the legal pad and handed it to me with a pen. “The night nurse is Gloria, the day nurse is Mr. Okafor. Ask them about the pain schedule. They’ll tell you it’s covered. It’s never covered. Write down what they say.”
She had been there three hours and already knew the nurses’ names.
Daddy stirred. His eyes found the window, then the coat, then her. For a second his whole face went soft and young.
“Retta,” he said.
“Hush, Ray. Go back to sleep.”
“You still wearing that ugly coat?”
“And you still snore.” She pulled the blanket up over his chest and tucked it, firm, on both sides. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The Legal Pad
They sent him home after nine days, to the one-bedroom apartment in Silver Spring he had lived in since the divorce. A hospital bed arrived and took over the living room. My little brother Marcus, who is twenty-four and in Atlanta and loves our father the way you love someone from a distance, wired money and called every evening at seven. I took the weekends and as many weeknights as my job would stand.
Mama took the rest.
She was at his door by seven every morning and did not leave until nine at night. That was forty minutes each way in the Buick, on the Beltway, in rush-hour traffic. She turned the legal pad into a chart, with a column for each medication and a different highlighter for each column, and she taped it to the refrigerator where the hospice nurse could read it. She learned how to flush a line. She learned how to turn him without hurting his back. When the nurse showed her once, she said, “Show me again,” and then she did it perfectly, as if she had been born knowing.
She rearranged the apartment in an afternoon. The bed moved to face the window. She bought a bird feeder, hung it from the balcony rail, and filled it, so that he had something to look at besides the ceiling. She brought his reading lamp from the bedroom and his good blanket from the closet, the green one I had not seen since I was a girl, and she never once asked where anything was. She just seemed to know what a man like him would put where.
For weeks he could keep down almost nothing. She made grits so thin they were closer to a drink and stood over him until he finished, the same way she once stood over me with cough syrup. She brewed a pot of coffee every morning, two sugars, no cream, exactly as he had always taken it, though he could not drink it anymore. “It’s for the smell,” she said. “A house ought to smell like morning.”
She talked to him about nothing. Eggs had gone up again. The Hendersons’ grandson had made the honor roll. Pastor Dennis had preached forty minutes on Martha and Mary and had somehow landed on the side of Martha. She never talked about the past. Not once, not in my hearing.
I would arrive after work and find her asleep upright in a kitchen chair with her shoes off, her stockinged feet side by side on the linoleum. Daddy would be watching her from the bed with an expression I had no name for. It was not quite gratitude and not quite shame. It was something older than both.
I kept trying to decide what I was looking at. They weren’t married, and they weren’t strangers. They looked like two people who had opened a shop together as teenagers and, after a long time apart, ended up closing it together.
Kitchen Floor
It came out of me on a Sunday night in the fifth week, at his kitchen sink, with my hands in dishwater and Daddy finally asleep in the next room.
“Do you know what I think about?” I said. I did not turn around. “The night after he left. I came downstairs for water, and you were on the kitchen floor. Just sitting there with your back against the cabinets, in your work clothes, with the lights off. You told me you were looking for a dish towel.”
Behind me the sound of her folding stopped.
“He walked out on you, Mama. He took everything he wanted and left you the rest, and you cleaned up after it for fifteen years. And now you’re here every single day, washing his sheets. I don’t understand how you can do it. I’m not saying don’t. I just don’t understand.”
For a long time the only sound was the refrigerator humming. Then she said, “Come sit down.”
I dried my hands and sat across from her at the little table. She had a towel half-folded in her lap, and she smoothed it flat before she spoke.
“I am not a saint, Danielle, and I don’t want you telling people I am. I’m still angry. I will probably die angry about some of it. But I have learned I can be mad at that man and wash his sheets in the same hour. Those two things don’t fight each other the way you’d think.”
“Then why?”
“Because he’s the only person left in this world who knew me before I was anybody’s mother.” She said it plainly, without any drama. “Before I was anybody’s wife, even. I was sixteen with braces and a green dress, and I thought I knew everything. When your father goes, that girl goes with him. I’d like to be there to see her off.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“And I stood up in a church and made a promise,” she went on. “A judge signed a paper, but I don’t remember anybody notifying the promise.” The corner of her mouth moved, almost a smile. “Besides, I’m doing this for me, too. When this is over, I want to look back at who I was during it and not be ashamed of her. That’s all. It isn’t any more noble than that.”
“It sounds pretty noble.”
“It’s a lot of laundry,” she said, and picked up the next towel.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that she owed him nothing, that love like hers had been wasted on a man like him, that somebody ought to keep a ledger of what was done and what was paid. But I looked at her hands moving over the cloth, steady and sure, and I understood that she had already kept that ledger. She had read it, closed it, and decided what to do with it.
I reached over, took a towel from the pile, and started folding.
Hospice
The hospice nurses started coming daily in November. The morphine got stronger and the days got shorter, and Daddy shrank into the hospital bed until the green blanket seemed to be covering only the idea of him.
One afternoon near the end, he had a good hour. It happens, the nurses told us. A clear window, like a break in the weather. Mama was at the foot of the bed trimming his toenails because they had gotten long and she could not stand it. I was in the doorway with a stack of mail.
“Loretta.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I was a poor husband to you.”
She did not look up. She kept working the clippers, one toe, then the next. “You were,” she said.
I held my breath. Daddy didn’t flinch. He just nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he has been handed the exact thing he asked for.
“You were also a good father,” she said, still not looking up. “And a good friend, some years. And the best dancer I ever saw in my life.”
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and she steadied his shoulder until it passed.
“I forgave you a long time ago, Ray,” she said. “Didn’t see the point in telling you. You’d have gotten comfortable.”
He laughed again, harder, and there were tears running into the creases beside his eyes. I had to step back into the hallway and press my hand against the wall.
He died on a Thursday, in the hour before dawn, in the second week of December.
The nurse had warned us it was close, so we had all stayed, Marcus on the speakerphone propped against a lamp, me on one side of the bed, Mama on the other. She had pulled her chair right up to the rail. For hours she did nothing but comb his hair with her fingers, back from his forehead, again and again, and hum an old hymn so low I felt it more than heard it.
His breaths began to space out. Eight seconds between them, then twelve. I was crying too hard to speak. Mama was not crying at all. She leaned down close to his ear.
“Dani’s all right,” she told him. “Marcus is all right. Everybody’s all right, Ray.” She smoothed his hair one more time. “Go on. I got it from here.”
He took one more breath, and then the room was quiet, and the bird feeder outside the window was full of sparrows, as if nothing at all had happened.
Mama sat there for a while with her hand on his chest. Then she looked up at me, her eyes wet at last, and said, in a voice I will hear for the rest of my life, “Well. That’s done.”
It did not sound like relief. It sounded like a woman setting down something heavy that she had been proud to carry.
Two Cups
At the funeral, Aunt Bernice tried to seat Mama in the front pew with the family. Mama thanked her and sat in the second row instead, in the same ugly coat, with her purse on her lap. “That seat’s not mine,” she told me afterward. “I just want to be near it.”
She held up through the service, the repast, and the long line of men from his old job who shook her hand and said Mrs. Whitfield as if the name were still hers to answer to. She held up through all of it, and she didn’t cry again until I found her in the church parking lot, sitting in the Buick with the engine off. I got in on the passenger side. We stayed like that for a long time and neither of us said anything.
The week after, I went to clear out the apartment. In the nightstand drawer, under a bundle of old pay stubs, I found a wedding photograph. Two kids in borrowed clothes, squinting at the sun. The corners were soft and gray from being handled, and there was a crease down the middle where it had been folded to fit in a wallet and later flattened out again. He had kept it for fifteen years, all the way through the grudge and the recliner and the Sunday phone calls, and not one word about it to anyone.
I didn’t show it to her. I still don’t know if that was mercy or cowardice. I put it in my purse, and it’s in a book on my shelf now, and someday, if she asks, I’ll tell her where it is.
On Sunday I drove out to the old house, the one with the kitchen floor. She was already up. The whole house smelled like coffee, two sugars, no cream, and she was standing at the counter with two cups in front of her. One for her. One she had poured without thinking, out of five weeks of mornings in Silver Spring and the thirteen years of marriage underneath them, out of a habit her hands had built when her mind wasn’t looking.
She stared at it. I watched her decide.
Then she picked up the second cup, carried it to the table, sat down, and drank it, grimacing at the sugar.
I had spent fifteen years believing the divorce had ended something. It hadn’t. It had only taken the marriage out of it and left everything else standing, the history and the habits and the stubborn, unglamorous fact of having known someone. My mother had not gone back to him. She had simply refused to walk away from the part that was left.
I poured myself a cup and sat down across from her.
“Too sweet,” she said.
“He liked it that way,” I said.
“I know what he liked,” said my mother, and she drank every drop.
