The Groceries My Mother In Law Threw Out
Donna’s car came down the gravel road about one thirty. I walked out to meet it, and I helped Ada up out of the passenger seat, and she stood there in the yard in a lavender church dress and a little white cardigan, eighty-seven years old, blinking in the sun, holding my arm. Brynn came running across the grass yelling “Nana Ada, Nana Ada,” and threw herself at the old woman’s knees, and Ada laughed and said, “There’s my Tuesday,” and a couple of the church women nearby heard it and looked at each other, not understanding yet, just noticing.
Lorraine came across the yard fast when she saw her mother. She put on the voice. “Mama, you made it, isn’t this wonderful, aren’t you glad I had you brought out.” She was performing the dutiful daughter for the crowd, loud enough to carry. And Ada, who was old but was not confused, not one bit, looked up at her daughter and then looked at me, holding her arm, and then looked at Brynn hanging off her knee, and I watched something move across that old woman’s face. I think it was the first time she let herself see it all laid out in one place: the daughter who announced her devotion to the yard, and the daughter in law who actually drove the county roads twice a week, standing side by side, and the whole county watching.
The program went the way Lorraine planned it, for a while. Tammy gave her toast. The pastor said a few words about the Proverbs woman and her lamp not going out at night, and I stood at the edge holding Brynn and thinking about Ada’s furnace. Then Lorraine stood up to say her thanks, glass in hand, and she went down the list, thanking everyone for coming, thanking the Lord, and then she said the thing she always said, the thing that had been true in her own mind for so long she no longer heard how it landed.
“And I just want to say,” she said, “that family is everything. Taking care of each other is everything. I have always believed that. I have always tried to take care of my own. My mother knows. Mama, you know how I have always looked after you.”
And she turned, and she smiled at Ada, and she lifted her glass to her mother in front of the whole yard, waiting for the old woman to nod and smile back and complete the picture.
Ada did not nod.
She put both hands on the arms of the folding chair and she pushed herself up to standing, slow, the way she did everything now, and Donna moved to help her and Ada waved her off. The yard went quiet the way a yard does when an old person stands up to speak, everybody leaning in out of respect before they even know what is coming. Lorraine’s smile held, but it got a little fixed.
“I want to say something,” Ada said. Her voice was thin but it carried, because nobody was making any other sound. “I am eighty-seven. I do not know how many more of these I get, so I am going to say the true thing while I am standing here and can.”