The Trip My Son Would Not Cancel

Stop making such a big deal out of it.

He did not say those exact words. But that was the whole of it, wrapped up in that soft reasonable voice he uses in meetings, the voice that has made him a good deal of money. His mother had been dead for four hours and my son was telling me not to make a big deal out of it, and then he told me he loved me, and then he was gone, and I stood in the kitchen where Marion had made forty-one Thanksgivings and I listened to the dial tone until it turned into that flat awful beeping, and then I set the phone down very carefully, the way you set down something that might break, and I went and sat with my wife.

I want to tell you about her now. Because Grant was right about one thing. She hated a fuss. But he was wrong about what that meant, the way he had been wrong about her his whole life, and the town knew it even if he never did.

Her name was Marion. We married in 1974 at Trinity Lutheran on the corner of Third and Maple, here in Bardwell, Ohio, which is a town of not quite two thousand people in the flat green middle of the state, forty minutes from anything you would call a city and about a hundred years behind it, which is how we like it. Her father farmed and my father farmed and we farmed, a hundred and eighty acres of corn and beans out on County Road 9 with the woodlot at the back that her grandfather had left standing. We raised two children in the white farmhouse my grandfather built. Grant first, in 1976. Then Colleen, three years later.

Marion was a quiet woman but do not mistake that for small. She taught Sunday school at Trinity for thirty-one years. When the Vanderpool boy came home from the service with his mind in pieces and no one knew what to do with him, it was Marion who drove out to that trailer twice a week for two years with a casserole and just sat, not talking, until he could. When the diner in town, the Bluebird, nearly went under the winter Donna’s husband ran off, it was Marion who quietly organized half the county to eat breakfast there every single morning until spring, and never once told Donna it was organized. She showed up. That was her whole religion, and it was a bigger one than most. She showed up, and she did not make a fuss about it, and that is a different thing entirely from not mattering.