The Mother In Law Who Stayed
She did not say she was sorry. She did something better. She went home, and she got on the phone, and by Sunday the whole of Delcie knew that Rachel Combs out on Pike Hollow Road was alone and expecting a sick baby and her husband had run off, and the women of that town did what the women of that town have always done, which is close ranks around the one who is down.
I want to be careful here, because I know how this can sound. I do not want you to picture a casserole or two and a card. I want you to understand what a rural church town actually does when it decides you are theirs.
It started with food. A freezer full of it. Chili and soup beans and cornbread and three kinds of cobbler, labeled with masking tape and reheating instructions in careful handwriting, enough that Lorene finally called a stop to it and asked people to hold off because we were going to lose some to freezer burn. Ladies I barely knew from the Delcie Missionary Baptist Church, where I had gone maybe a dozen times in my life, started showing up with things. A rocking chair. A box of near-new baby clothes from a grandmother whose own grandbabies had outgrown them. A woman named Patsy Crabtree, who I had always thought did not like me, brought over a handmade quilt, white with little yellow ducks, and when I thanked her she waved it off and said her hands needed something to do and I had done her a favor.
The men did the man things, the quiet ones. Travis had left the truck’s registration lapsed and I had not had the money or the mind to deal with it, and one morning Dolores’s husband Earl came and took it to Carranville and had it done and would not let me pay him back. Somebody mowed my grass while I was at my shift and I never found out who. The deacon from the church, a soft-spoken man named Brother Haskell, came out and walked the whole house with Lorene and fixed the back step that had been loose since before Travis left, and oiled the storm door so it stopped banging, and looked at the furnace for the coming winter, and the whole time he talked to me about anything but my trouble, which was its own kind of kindness.
And then Dolores had her idea.
She brought it to me on a Tuesday, the meatloaf day, at my own kitchen table, with Lorene sitting right there. She said the hospital in Louisville, even with the aid Patrice had lined up, was going to leave me with bills. That is just how it is. The surgery would be covered, mostly, but there was the staying. The gas back and forth, two hours each way. The weeks I would not be working. The things you cannot plan for. She said the fire hall was free on the third Saturday of the month and she had already talked to the chief.