The Card My Mother In Law Carried
I opened the front door and I stepped onto the porch. I did not step down. I stood at the top of the three steps with my hand on the sagging rail, and I looked at them, and for a long minute none of us said a thing.
“Sylvia,” Thelma said finally. She had put herself back together on the drive. Her hair was set, her lipstick was fresh, and she was holding her purse in front of her with both hands. “I think we can all agree that today got out of hand.”
“I do not agree,” I said.
“Kip made a mistake. I made an error of judgment. Families have these things.”
“Thelma,” I said, “you knelt on a carpet and put a shoe on my husband’s girlfriend.”
“I was being kind to a young person.”
“You were being kind with my money.”
Her mouth tightened. “I don’t know what you think you are going to do. You cannot put a woman my age out of her own home. That house is mine.”
“It is yours,” I agreed. “The house on Pecan Street is yours. You may keep it. I stopped paying the note at three o’clock this afternoon, and the bank will send you a letter, and you will have thirty days to bring it current or the bank will explain to you how mortgages work.”
Her face went the color of old paper.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I did,” I said. “At 2:58.”
“I have lived in that house for forty years.”
“And for six of them I have paid for it. You never said thank you once. Think about that when you open your mail.”
Kip took a step forward. “Syl. Come on. You don’t have to bring Mama into it.”
“Kip,” I said, “your mother told your girlfriend that I keep the books and you keep the family, so the whole atrium could hear. She brought herself.”
“You never mean anything,” I added. “That is your gift. Everyone else pays for it.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“You have a mother. She has a house. I understand there is a guest room.”
I watched them look at each other, and I saw the truest thing I learned that year. Neither one wanted the other. They had been united by my money, and the minute it was gone they were two people in a yard, each wondering whether the other had been the plan.
Kip picked up the suitcases. Thelma opened the Cadillac’s trunk, and he put them in, and neither of them said another word to me.
They drove away at five forty. I stood on the porch until the taillights went around the bend, and then I went inside and ate a bowl of cereal standing at the sink, and I slept nine hours straight for the first time in two years.
Here is what I did not expect: the town.
By Sunday every woman in the third pew on the left knew every detail of that afternoon, and by Monday so did the Rotary, the beauty parlor, and the feed co-op. I did not tell anyone. The woman who brought the ham to my father’s funeral had stood five feet from the whole thing, and I have never seen a small town move so efficiently.
Thelma did not come to church that Sunday, or the next. The third week she came in late and sat in the back, and the church ladies were kind to her the way you are kind to a woman at a funeral, and she knew it. She stopped going to the club. I am told she said her hip was bothering her.