The Parking Spot That Took Eleven Years

The spot is the third one from the door at Pilgrim Rest Community Church, on the shady side, under the one good maple in the whole gravel lot. If you have ever parked a car in August in Cloverleaf, Missouri, you know that shade is not a small thing. It is the difference between a steering wheel you can hold and a steering wheel that brands your palms like a cattle iron. That spot was mine. I had parked there every Sunday for nine years, since the autumn my husband Marvin passed and I started driving myself to the eight-thirty service in his old Buick.

And then one Sunday in the spring of 1994, a stranger took it.

I want to tell you that I handled it like a Christian woman. I want to tell you that I drove on past, found another spot out by the propane tank, and gave the matter to the Lord on the walk in. But I am going to be honest with you, because this whole story falls apart if I am not, and because I am too old now to pretend I was ever better than I was. What I actually did was sit in that Buick with the engine running and stare at the back end of a mustard-yellow Plymouth Reliant that did not belong to anybody I knew, and I felt my whole face go hot.

Her name, I would learn, was Verlene Ostrander. She had moved up from Poplar Bluff to live with her sister after some trouble I did not yet understand. And for the next eleven years, Verlene Ostrander and I were locked in the pettiest, most stubborn, most ridiculous war that the congregation of Pilgrim Rest had ever seen. The deacons knew about it. The choir knew about it. Eventually the children knew about it, and they made a game of getting to the lot early on Sunday to see which of us would claim the maple spot, like it was a horse race and we were the two old mares.

I am eighty-one years old now. Verlene passed two winters ago, in February, with her hand in mine. And the thing I most want you to understand, before I tell you the rest, is this: the eleven years I spent hating that woman were the most foolish years of my life, and the reason I hated her was a misunderstanding so small and so stupid that when I finally learned the truth of it, I sat down on the church steps and wept like I had lost something. I had. I had lost eleven years.

Let me start at the beginning, the right way, so you understand what kind of woman I was and what kind of woman she was, and why two people who should have been friends from the first handshake spent over a decade refusing to look at each other across a gravel lot.

My name is Ottilie Brauer. Most folks call me Ottie. I was born in 1925 in a farmhouse two miles east of Cloverleaf that does not stand anymore, and I have lived my whole life inside a circle you could draw with about a fifteen-mile radius. My people were German on both sides, the kind that came over and farmed and did not say much and did not waste anything, including words. My mother used to say that a soft answer turns away wrath, and then she would give you a look that was not soft at all, and that is more or less the contradiction I was raised inside.

Marvin and I were married forty-one years. He drove a propane truck for the co-op and he could fix anything with an engine and he loved me in the quiet, dependable way that you do not appreciate until it is gone. When he died of a heart that simply stopped one Tuesday morning in the machine shed, I did not know how to be a person by myself. I had never lived alone a day in my life. I went from my father’s house to Marvin’s, and then suddenly the house was just mine and the silence in it was so loud I could not sleep.

So church became the thing that held me together. Not in a showy way. I was never one of the women who cried in the aisle or raised her hands. I just needed the routine of it. I needed to get up on Sunday and put on a real dress and drive Marvin’s Buick the four miles into town and park in the same place and walk in through the same door and sit in the same pew, third from the back on the left, and let the old hymns do their slow work on me. That parking spot under the maple was the first decision of my week, and it was the one thing I could count on. You may think that is a small thing to build a life around. When you have buried your husband and your parents and two of your brothers, you will understand how a small, dependable thing can become a load-bearing wall.

That is the part Verlene did not know when she took my spot. And it is the part I did not know about her, either, which is the whole point of this story. We were two women who had each built our Sunday morning around that little patch of shade for reasons we never bothered to ask each other. We just saw a thief.

The first Sunday she took it, I told myself it was an honest mistake. She was new. She did not know the unwritten map of the lot, the one every regular carried in her head. So I parked out by the propane tank and walked in and I did not say a word, and I felt very righteous about my restraint, which I now understand is its own kind of sin.

The second Sunday, she took it again. And this time, when I walked past her car on my way in, she was still sitting in it, and she looked up at me through the window, and our eyes met. And here is the moment the whole eleven years turned on, though neither of us knew it. I gave her a look. Not a smile. The other thing. The look my mother used to give, the one that is not soft at all. And Verlene Ostrander, instead of looking ashamed or apologetic the way a decent person ought to, looked right back at me and lifted her chin, just slightly, just enough, and turned her face away.

That was it. That was the whole declaration of war. A look through a car window. Eleven years.

Now I have to tell you about the look, because the look is the misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding is everything.

What I read in Verlene’s chin, that morning and for eleven years after, was contempt. I read a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, who had decided that the new arrival outranked the widow, who was telling me without a word that she did not care whose spot it was and she would take it because she could. I built an entire person out of that one tilt of the chin. In my mind, Verlene Ostrander became proud, cold, hard, a city woman from Poplar Bluff who thought small-town folks were beneath her. Every single thing she did for the next eleven years, I poured through that filter, and the filter made all of it ugly.

When she did not greet me in the fellowship hall, I called it snobbery. When she joined the quilting circle that I had been part of for twenty years, I called it nerve. When she got the solo on Easter, I called it showing off. When she parked in my spot, every single week, rain or shine, sometimes arriving twenty minutes early just to get it, I called it war. And it was war. We waged it.

I started getting up earlier. She started getting up earlier than that. There was one Sunday in 1997 when I left my house at seven-fifteen for an eight-thirty service, and I pulled into the lot feeling like the smartest woman in Cloverleaf, and the mustard-yellow Reliant was already sitting under the maple with frost still on its windshield, which meant she had gotten there before me and gone back home and come back, or worse, slept in it. I will not tell you what I said inside that Buick. It was not a hymn.

We fought the whole war in silence. That is the part that sounds strange to people now. We never once spoke a cross word to each other. Not one. In eleven years, Verlene and I exchanged maybe forty words total, and all of them were the bare minimum the church would force on us, “excuse me” and “the casserole’s in the kitchen” and “after you.” We were both too proud and too Lutheran and too raised-right to make a scene. So we just refused each other. We were experts at refusing each other. I could be in a room with that woman for two hours and never once let my eyes land on her, and she could do the same to me, and we did, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, while the pastor preached on love your neighbor and we both sat there with our jaws set.

The congregation found it hilarious, eventually. I did not know that at the time. I thought I was being dignified. But years later one of the deacons, Thaddeus Korbel, told me that there had been a betting pool. The young men of the church, and a few of the older ones who should have known better, would lay quarters on which car would be under the maple come Sunday morning. They called it the Maple Stakes. Thad said it ran for the better part of a decade and that more than one boy paid for his first truck tires on the strength of Verlene Ostrander’s stubbornness and mine.

I should have been embarrassed. I was, when I found out. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I want to tell you about a particular Sunday, because it is the one I am most ashamed of, and because Verlene never once held it against me, which I did not understand until the very end.

It was the winter of 2001. There had been an ice storm, the bad kind, the kind that takes down power lines and coats the whole county in glass. The church lot was a skating rink. Half the congregation stayed home. But I went, because going was the thing that held me together, and I crept that Buick into town at fifteen miles an hour with my hands shaking on the wheel. And when I got to the lot, the maple spot was open. For the first time in years, the maple spot was open. Verlene’s Reliant was nowhere in sight. And I felt, God forgive me, a flash of pure triumph. I had won. The ice had kept her home and I had come anyway and the spot was mine.

I parked in it. Under my maple. And I walked into that church feeling like I had conquered something, and I sat in my pew, and I did not think about Verlene Ostrander at all, except to think that she had finally given up.

She had not given up. She had fallen on the ice in her own driveway that morning and broken her hip.

I did not learn that until the next week, and when I did, I felt a shame so deep it sat in my stomach like a stone. While I was sitting in that pew congratulating myself on my empty parking spot, that woman was lying on the frozen concrete of her sister’s driveway, unable to get up, calling out in a voice nobody could hear. A neighbor found her near forty minutes later. She was in the hospital in Poplar Bluff for two weeks and in a rehabilitation home after that, and she did not come back to Pilgrim Rest until the spring.

And when she came back, she walked with a cane, and she was slower, and the first Sunday she returned, I got to the lot early and I saw her Reliant turn in, and I did something I had not done in seven years.

I left the maple spot open for her.

I parked out by the propane tank, in the cold sun, with no shade and a long walk, and I left the good spot open, and I sat in my Buick and watched her ease that yellow car into it with her stiff hip, and I told myself it was Christian charity. I told myself I was being the bigger woman. I told myself a lot of things. What I did not do was walk over and say I was sorry she had fallen, or ask how she was healing, or tell her I was glad she was back. Because we did not speak. That was the rule of the war, and even my charity had to obey the rule. So I gave her the spot and I gave her nothing else, and I felt good about myself, and that, I see now, was its own kind of cruelty, the cruelty of a kindness that costs you nothing but will not look the other person in the eye.

Verlene took the spot. And the next Sunday, when her hip was a little better, she took it again, and we went right back to the war, except now there was a cane involved and I could not in good conscience race a woman with a cane, so mostly I let her have it, and I told myself I was being gracious, and the years rolled on.

Marvin had a saying. He used to say that the longest distance in the world is the distance between two stubborn people who are both sure they are right. I did not understand that saying until I was the one standing on one side of it.

I want to be fair to Verlene now, because she is not here to speak for herself, and because for eleven years I was not fair to her at all. So let me tell you the things I knew about her, the true things, the ones I refused to let soften me at the time.

I knew she sang. She had a low, warm voice, an alto, and when the choir did the old hymns, hers was the voice underneath all the others holding them up. I used to tell myself I hated it. I did not hate it. I would close my eyes during “It Is Well With My Soul” and let that voice carry me, and then I would remember who it belonged to and open my eyes and set my jaw.

I knew she was good to the children. There was a boy named Linus Hartwig, a skinny, anxious child whose mother worked two jobs, and Verlene took him under her wing in the Sunday school, and she made him a quilt with tractors on it because his daddy drove a John Deere, and I saw that boy carry that quilt around like a flag for two years. A cold city woman does not make a quilt with tractors on it for a stranger’s anxious son. I knew that. I knew it did not fit the person I had built out of one tilt of a chin. I just put it in a drawer in my mind and shut the drawer.

I knew she came to every funeral. Every single one. In a town like Cloverleaf, people die in a steady, sorrowful rhythm, and the church buries them, and Verlene Ostrander was at every burial, standing at the back, in the cold, in a black coat that had seen many winters. When my brother Augustin passed in 2003, she was there. She did not speak to me. She stood at the back of the cemetery in her black coat with her cane, and when it was over and people were filing out, I saw her standing by the gate, and our eyes met, and she gave me the smallest nod. Not the chin. A nod. And I, fool that I was, nodded back the bare minimum and turned away, because we did not speak, and a war is a war.

This went on, the two of us, year after year, until I was seventy-six years old and she was seventy-nine, two old women who had spent more than a decade refusing to be friends over a patch of shade, and who were both, though neither of us would have said it, lonelier than we had any right to be.

And then came the day everything turned over, which was not dramatic at all, which was in fact about as ordinary as a day can be, and which I have replayed ten thousand times since.

It was a Wednesday. Not even a Sunday. The church basement flooded in a hard June rain, the sump pump gave out, and the pastor put out a call for anyone who could come help move the Sunday school supplies up off the floor before they ruined. I went, because I had nothing else to do on a Wednesday and because the church had held me together for so long that the least I could do was bail it out. And when I came down those basement stairs, Verlene Ostrander was already there, in an old housedress, with her cane hooked over a chair, carrying boxes of construction paper to higher ground.

We were the only two who came.

The whole rest of the congregation, and there was a flood, and only the two old enemies showed up to fight it. I have thought about that many times. I think the Lord has a sense of humor, and I think He arranged that flood.

So there we were. And we could not refuse each other now, because there was no one else to refuse to, and the water was rising, and the construction paper does not care about your pride. So we worked. In silence at first, the old silence, the war silence. I carried boxes up the stairs and she stacked them and we did not speak. But a basement is a small place, and a flood is a slow emergency, and after an hour of it your arms ache and your back complains and eventually one of you has to say something, and it was her, it was Verlene, who finally broke eleven years of silence.

She set down a box of hymnals and she put her hand on her bad hip and she said, “You know, Ottie, I always wondered why you hated me so much over that fool parking spot.”

And I, with a box of crayons in my arms and water around my ankles, said the truest thing I had said in eleven years. I said, “Because you took it from me. And you weren’t even sorry. You looked right at me and lifted your chin like I was nothing.”

Verlene Ostrander looked at me like I had spoken in Chinese.

“Lifted my chin,” she said.

“That first Sunday. In your car. You looked at me and you lifted your chin and you turned away. Like I was beneath you.”

And Verlene sat down, slow, on a folding chair, in the flooded basement, with the rain coming down outside, and she started to laugh. Not a mean laugh. A broken kind of laugh, the kind that has tears caught up in it. And she laughed and shook her head and put her hand over her mouth, and when she could finally talk, she told me the thing that ended the war and broke my heart and gave me my last and best friend, all in about four sentences.

“Ottie,” she said. “I didn’t lift my chin at you. I couldn’t hear you. I can’t hear out of my left ear, I haven’t been able to since I was a girl, scarlet fever took it. When somebody talks to me on my left side, I have to turn my good ear toward them. That’s what you saw. I turned my head so I could hear you. And you never said anything, so I figured you’d just looked at me funny and moved on. I lifted my chin because I was leaning in to catch what you might say. I have spent eleven years thinking you were the coldest woman in this church, because every single time I turned my good ear to you, you’d already walked off.”

I want you to sit with that, the way I have had to sit with it. Eleven years. Both of us. I thought she lifted her chin in contempt. She was turning her deaf ear away so she could hear me. I read pride. It was scarlet fever. And every time she turned to catch my words, I had already decided she was snubbing me, and I had already turned my own back, which to her looked exactly like the snobbery I was busy accusing her of. We had each been looking at a mirror the whole time and calling our own reflection an enemy.

And the spot. Oh, the spot. I asked her, that day in the basement, with the water around our ankles, why she had fought me so hard for that one patch of shade for eleven years. And she told me the last piece.

“My sister’s house faced east,” she said. “My bedroom window caught the morning sun and it was too bright for my eyes, I have always had bad eyes. The only place I could see well on a Sunday morning, with the sun where it was, was that one shady spot under the maple. Anywhere else in that lot, the glare came up off the gravel and I couldn’t make out the church steps. I’m half blind in the morning, Ottie. I wasn’t fighting you for the shade. I was fighting you so I could see where I was walking.”

Half deaf and half blind. And too proud to say so, the same as I was too proud to say I needed that spot because it was the one dependable thing in a widow’s week. Two women, each carrying a private reason she would not speak aloud, each reading the other’s silence as scorn. The longest distance in the world is the distance between two stubborn people who are both sure they are right.

We sat in that basement and we talked for three hours. The flood could wait. We talked until the water stopped rising and the pastor came down and found two old women sitting in folding chairs in two inches of water, talking like they were trying to make up for eleven lost years in a single afternoon, which we were.

I learned that Verlene had come to Cloverleaf because her husband had run off and left her with debts, and she had come to live with her sister out of pure necessity, ashamed, certain the whole town saw her as a failure. I had read her stiff back as pride. It was shame, the cousin of pride, the one that wears the same coat. I learned she had no children, that the quilt with the tractors had been made for Linus Hartwig because she had always wanted a boy and never had one. I learned that her low alto voice, the one I pretended to hate, was the only thing that had kept her from despair in the worst years, that she sang because singing was the one place the deafness and the bad eyes and the shame could not follow her.

And I told her my things, too. I told her about Marvin and the propane truck and the silence in the house. I told her about the spot being the first decision of my week. I told her, and this was hard, that I had left it open for her the Sunday she came back from breaking her hip, and that I had been too proud to say I was glad she was alive. And Verlene reached over and took my hand in her cold, strong, quilting hand, and she said, “I knew you left it open, Ottie. I knew. That was the day I started to think maybe I had you wrong.”

She had thought she had me wrong for four years and never said so. I had thought I had her wrong since the tractor quilt and never said so. We had both known, in some buried way, that we were fighting a phantom. We just could not find the door out of the war by ourselves. It took a flood and a busted sump pump and a whole congregation staying home in the rain to put us in a room with no one to refuse but each other.

Here is what I most want the women reading this to hear, because I think some of you are in a war like mine right now, with a sister or a neighbor or a woman at your own church, and you have built a whole person out of one look, one tone, one thing she said at a funeral fifteen years ago, and you are both sure you are right.

You are probably both half deaf and half blind in some way you have never told each other.

Verlene and I had eleven years left after that flood. Only eleven. The same number we wasted. And I will tell you, those eleven were worth a hundred. We drove to church together after that, in my Buick, because her eyes had gotten worse and she could not drive the Reliant in the morning glare anymore, and do you know where we parked? Out by the propane tank. Every single Sunday. On purpose. We left the maple spot open for whoever needed it, some young mother wrestling a car seat, some old man with a walker, and we walked in together from the far end of the lot, slow, her on my arm, two old women laughing about the eleven years we spent fighting over shade neither of us would use again.

The congregation could not believe it. Thaddeus Korbel told me the betting pool collapsed, that nobody knew what to do with the Maple Stakes when the two horses started arriving in the same car. The children, who had grown up watching us refuse each other, watched us become inseparable, and I like to think that taught them something better than the war did.

Verlene sang at my brother Augustin’s memorial stone dedication. I learned to quilt, badly, at her kitchen table, and she never once let me quit, the same way she had never let Linus Hartwig quit. We took our supper together most nights, two widows of a sort, hers from a coward and mine from a heart attack, and we did not need the television on because we finally had someone to talk to. I told her things I had never told Marvin. She told me things she had never told a soul. Eleven years of silence, and then eleven years where we could not seem to stop.

Two winters ago, her heart began to fail, the way hearts do, slow and then fast. I sat with her in the county hospital in Poplar Bluff, the same town she had come from in shame all those years ago, and I held her hand, the good strong quilting hand, and I leaned in close to her good ear, the right one, because I had learned by then which ear could hear me, and I said the thing I should have said in 1994 and did not. I said, “I’m sorry I was so quick to think the worst of you, Verlene. I’m sorry for the eleven years.”

And Verlene Ostrander, with about a day of life left in her, turned her good ear toward me so she would not miss a word, and she squeezed my hand, and she said, “Ottie, you old fool. Don’t you be sorry. We got the spot. We got the spot in the end.”

I did not understand at first. Then I did. The spot was never the patch of shade. The spot was the place beside another person. The whole time, both of us thinking we were fighting over gravel, we were really just two lonely women circling the thing we needed most and refusing to admit we needed it. We got the spot in the end. We got the place beside each other. It just took us eleven foolish years to stop fighting and sit down in it.

She passed the next morning, in February, with frost on the hospital window, the way there had been frost on her Reliant the Sunday I thought she had beaten me to the lot. I drove home alone in the Buick. And that Sunday I went to church, because going is still the thing that holds me together, and I parked out by the propane tank, in the cold sun, where she and I had always parked together, and I left the maple spot open under the tree, and I walked in alone from the far end of the lot.

But I did not feel alone. I felt like I had the best friend I ever had walking beside me, on my arm, on my left side, which was the side she could not hear from, which is why I had learned to walk on her right, so I could lean down and tell her things and know she caught every word.

I am eighty-one now. I do not have many Sundays left, and I know it, and I am not afraid of it, because Verlene taught me that the spot is always there if you are humble enough to ask for it. So let me leave you with the only thing I really know, the thing it took me sixty years and one flood to learn.

The woman you have decided to hate is probably leaning in to hear you. The chin you read as pride is somebody turning her one good ear toward your voice. The spot you are fighting over is never the spot. Go find out why she takes it. Go say the thing you are too proud to say. Do it now, while there is still frost on the window and breath in the body, because eleven years go faster than you would ever believe, and the only thing worse than losing the war is winning it alone.

I will see Verlene again. I believe that the way I believe the maple will leaf out come spring. And when I do, I am going to walk up on her right side, so she hears me clear, and I am going to say, “Move over, Ostrander. I am parking next to you, and this time it is for keeps.”

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.