The Groceries My Mother In Law Threw Out

Because here is what I figured out fast: I could not buy Ada’s groceries separate. If I bought two carts, Lorraine would have found the second receipt, the second set of bags, and she would have asked, and I did not have it in me to fight her about her own mother. She would have made it ugly. She would have made it about money, or about me going behind her back, or about me making her look bad. So I folded Ada’s groceries into ours. I bought big. I bought double. I let my mother in law stand in my kitchen and call me wasteful and a poor manager and a girl who would not have lasted a week in her day, and I let the frozen peas go in the trash, and I said nothing, because the peas were not the point. The point was fifty minutes away, eating a hot supper, not alone.

Brynn came the second year. Our daughter. By the time she was four she knew that Tuesdays were Nana Ada days, and she rode along in her car seat with a drawing in her lap to tape to Ada’s refrigerator, and Ada’s green-shuttered house slowly filled up with the crayon suns and horses of a little girl who adored her. Ada called Brynn “my Tuesday.” She would say, “Is my Tuesday coming?” on the phone, and it got so Brynn thought the day itself was named after her.

I paid for things too. I am not going to pretend money did not come into it, because it did, quietly, over the years. When Ada’s furnace quit in January I called the man and I paid him and I told Ada the warranty covered it. When her little property taxes came due and she showed me the notice with her hands shaking, I paid them and told her the county had a program for folks her age. There was no program. There was just me and a checking account Wes and I kept separate for the farm, and a decision I made over and over not to let an eighty-something-year-old woman sit cold or scared over a few hundred dollars.

I want to be plain about one thing, because I know how this could sound. I never did any of it with papers. There was no deed, no will, no lawyer, no clever arrangement where I ended up owning something or being owed something. I want you to understand that, because when it all finally came out, that was the first place Lorraine’s mind went, to money and schemes, and it was the most telling thing about her, that she could not imagine a person just doing a kind thing with no hook in it. There was no hook. There was a cold refrigerator and a woman I loved, and that is the entire ledger.

Meanwhile, in Linden Grove, the kitchen war went on.

It got worse the longer I was in that house, not better. Grief did not explain it after the first year, and I stopped giving it that. Lorraine needed me to be less than her, and the kitchen was where she could make that true. She did it in front of people, which was the part that cut. At Easter dinner, in front of Tammy and Tammy’s husband and the cousins, she lifted the lid off my scalloped potatoes and made a face and said, “Well, we will see,” and set the lid back down, and everyone laughed the little nervous laugh, and I stood there holding a dish towel folded in thirds because I had learned to fold them in thirds, and I smiled.