PART 2: The Winter My Mother Took Her In
“Say it, Mama. Say the part you left out.”
Nadine’s hands went flat on the arms of her wheelchair. Her rings had gotten loose over the last few years, and the gold one slid down to her knuckle.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
Wes didn’t repeat himself. He just sat there with his hands folded, the way he sits through a whole church service without moving.
The aide with the water pitcher set it down on the table and stepped back toward the wall. At the next table, old Ruth Ferris turned her chair a few inches so she could see us better. Somebody’s oxygen machine hummed behind the craft cabinet.
“Wes,” Nadine said. “Not here.”
“Here,” Wes said.
He looked at me. Then at my mother, three tables over, sitting up straight in her good blouse with her pocketbook in her lap.
“Mama,” he said, “this is Dottie Hendricks’ daughter. You’ve known that for thirty years. And I have let you be ugly to her for every one of them.”
Nadine’s chin came up. “I have never been ugly.”
“You told her she wasn’t family eleven minutes ago.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not.”
He said it quiet. He says everything quiet.
“Now,” he said. “Here’s the part I’ve been carrying.”
*
“I was nine years old,” Wes said.
Nadine closed her eyes.
“Daddy had been gone since March. You told me we were going to stay with Aunt Faye in Ohio for a while. We never went to Ohio.”
“Wes.”
“We drove two hours west and we stopped at a little white house on Route 9. Porch sagged on the left side. There was a wringer washer on the back porch and a dog that didn’t bark at anybody.”
I knew that porch. I learned to walk on that porch.
“You slept in the back bedroom,” Wes said. “Blue quilt with the star pattern. I slept on the daybed in the dining room and listened to the radio through the wall. I took a John Deere lunch box to school every single day that winter and nobody at that school ever asked me one question about it.”
Nadine’s mouth was moving but nothing came out.
“Five months,” Wes said. “We were there five months. And every night that woman put food on the table, and every morning she handed me a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and you told me not to say a word to anybody because people would think less of us.”
“That was a long time ago,” Nadine said.
“It was fifty-one years ago,” Wes said. “And you have spent every one of the fifty-one years scrubbing that winter off the floor.”
Nobody in the activity room was talking. The punch was sweating in the little cups. Tanya, the aide who’s been on my mother’s hall since the beginning, had her hand up near her mouth.
Wes leaned forward.
“You didn’t want Bonnie in your house because Bonnie looks like her mother. You couldn’t tell me not to marry her, because telling me not to marry her would mean telling me why. So you just made her pay for it. Year after year.”
Nadine looked at me then. Really looked. Her eyes were wet and I did not care.
“It was one winter,” she said.
“It was one winter,” Wes said, “and it was the only kindness anybody showed us that whole year.”
*
I stood up.
I want to be honest about something. I have been afraid of that woman since I was twenty-eight years old. I have handed her coffee. I have made her Christmas pies and driven her to her knee appointments and sat in a hospital hallway at two in the morning while she had her gall bladder out. Thirty years of being polite, because she was my husband’s mother and I thought that was the price.
I put my mother’s cardigan down on the table. Navy with the pearl buttons, tag still on.
“Mrs. Boyd,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Her head came around.
“I’m not taking my mother upstairs and I’m not sitting at another table and I’m not leaving early. She has been waiting for the sing-along since Tuesday. She has a good blouse on.”
“Bonnie—”
“I called you Mrs. Boyd for thirty years because on my wedding day you told me I hadn’t earned anything else. That was fine. I earned it other ways. I sat with you. I fed you. I never once said a word against you to your son, not once, not even on the bad days.”
My voice shook a little. I let it.
“But you do not get to tell a woman with a John Deere lunch box in her memory that her mother’s kitchen never happened.”
Nadine’s hands came up off the arms of the chair and then went back down.
“I’m not going to yell at you,” I said. “You’re eighty-seven and you’re in a wheelchair and it wouldn’t help anything. But I’m not leaving. So if one of us has to go, it’s not going to be me.”
The room stayed quiet.
Then Wes stood up and took the handles of his mother’s chair.
“Come on, Mama,” he said. “I’ll walk you up.”
“I don’t want to go up,” Nadine said.
“I know,” Wes said.
He rolled her out past the craft cabinet and down the long hall toward the elevator. Nobody said anything. Tanya found something to do with the water pitcher. Ruth Ferris patted the table twice, slow, like she was keeping time.
At one o’clock, Dawn pulled in from Peoria with a store-bought cake and a balloon. She stood in the doorway looking for her aunt’s table and found me sitting at it with my mother, cutting the cake into squares.
“Where’s Aunt Nadine?”
“Resting,” I said.
She didn’t ask twice.
Mama ate two pieces of cake and sang every word of “Blue Kentucky Girl.”
*
Wes and I sat in the parking lot afterward with the engine off. He had his hands on the wheel like he was still driving.
“You knew,” I said.
“I knew.”
“Since when?”
“Twenty-nine years ago you showed me a picture of your mother’s house. I looked at that porch and I couldn’t breathe for a minute.”
“And you said nothing.”
“I said nothing.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for a long time. A cart with linens rattled past the front doors.
“Because telling you meant telling on my mother,” he said. “And I was a coward about it. Not once. Not once a week. Every day for twenty-nine years, I decided to be a coward again.”
I looked out the window at the brick wall.
“I’m not angry about her,” I said. “I’ve been angry at your mother since 1994. I know how to be angry at your mother. She’s good at it. She makes it easy.”
He waited.
“I’m angry that you watched me pass her the peas every Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’m angry that you sat next to me in a hospital hallway and let me believe I was the one who wasn’t good enough. I could have used one word, Wes. One word, ten years ago, in a car, on a Tuesday. That’s all it would have taken.”
“I know,” he said.
“Say it again.”
“I know.”
He turned the key. We drove home without the radio.
*
Travis came Sunday with my granddaughter June, who is seven and has opinions.
I told him on the porch while June dug in the flower bed with a spoon.
He sat down on the step. He’s forty-three, and he’s got my father’s forehead.
“So Grandma Nadine was the lady in the back room.”
“She was.”
“Huh,” he said.
That was all for a while.
Then June came up with dirt to her elbows. “Nana Dottie gives me two peppermints,” she said. “Is that because of the lunch box boy?”
Travis and I looked at each other.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Grandpa Wes told me at church,” she said. “He said the lunch box boy lives in his pocket now.”
She went back to the flower bed. Travis wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked out at the road a long time.
“Mom,” he said. “You should have told me.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I know. I just mean—” He stopped. “I would have said something. I’ve been letting her talk to you like that at Christmas for twenty years and I never once said anything either.”
“Now you know,” I said.
“Now I know.”
*
The next Tuesday I sat with Mama in her room and told her the whole thing. The winter, the daybed, the lunch box, all of it.
She was quiet so long I thought she’d drifted off.
“Nadine,” she said finally.
“You remember.”
“I remember a young woman with her hair pinned up who wouldn’t eat until we sat down first.” Mama smoothed the sheet with two fingers. “She asked me not to tell anybody. She stood right there in my kitchen and asked me.”
“Why didn’t you.”
Mama thought about that.
“It wasn’t mine to tell,” she said. “She was ashamed. That’s heavy. If she wanted to put it down, that was hers to do.”
I sat with that a minute.
“She told me I wasn’t family,” I said.
“Oh, honey.” Mama reached over and patted my arm twice. “She’s never known what she is. That’s a different kind of hungry.”
*
Two weeks after Visiting Day, Tanya caught me in the hall.
“Mrs. Boyd wants to see you. She said to tell you she’s sorry if you felt unwelcome.”
I stopped walking.
“That’s not an apology,” I said. “Tell her that.”
Tanya nodded like she’d been expecting it. “I’ll tell her.”
Three days later I went anyway.
Nadine was by the window in her room with her purse on her lap, the way she always sat. There was no audience. Just the two of us and a cart rattling past in the hall.
“I was unkind to you,” she said.
I waited.
“For thirty years. Starting at your wedding.” She looked at her hands. “I wasn’t unkind because of anything you did. I was unkind because you look like your mother’s kitchen, and I have spent my whole life being a woman who never sat in anybody’s kitchen.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me today,” she said. “I’m asking you to come back.”
I stood there a second.
“I’ll be here Thursday,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got right now, Mrs. Boyd.”
She nodded slowly. Then she said, “Nadine.”
“What?”
“You can call me Nadine.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
“I’ll work on it,” I said. “Nadine.”
*
Last Sunday, Wes and I sat with Mama in her room. She’d been tired all week and she wanted to stay in.
Wes told her about the Cardinals game. Mama told him about a cousin of mine she hasn’t spoken to since 1971. The afternoon went by like a slow train.
When we got up to leave, Mama reached over to her nightstand.
She didn’t say anything. She just held the milk-glass dish out toward my husband.
Wes took one peppermint. Then he did what he used to do with his coat on a winter morning — he put it up in his shirt pocket, careful, like he was saving it for later.
“Still the same pocket,” Mama said.
“Same one,” Wes said.
The dish went back on the nightstand, lid off, half full.
Ready for whoever came through the door next.