The Plate My Sister Threw Over My House

I stayed. I married a man from the next township over, Rick, and we had a boy, Cody, and then Rick decided at thirty-six that he wanted a different life, and he went and got it with a woman from his work, and I was a single mother at thirty with a job at the elementary school cafeteria, which is still the job I have, and I have fed half the children in this county a hot lunch and I am not ashamed of a single day of it. Cody grew up good and went off to the service and then to a job in North Carolina, and he calls me every Sunday, and he is the best thing I ever did.

So that is the two of us. Diane up on the hill, me down in the valley with the cafeteria hairnet. For most of our lives it did not matter. It only mattered when our mother got sick, because then one of those two roads led back to Benner’s Creek, and the other did not.

Her name was Ruth. Ruth Alberta, after both her grandmothers, and she ran the kitchen at Mount Zion Methodist for thirty-one years, which in a town like ours is practically an office you hold. Every funeral for three decades, every wedding, every fire company dinner, my mother was back in that church kitchen with her sleeves pushed up, feeding the grieving and the celebrating the same way, ham and scalloped potatoes and green beans she canned herself and a kind word that she meant. People here did not love my mother because she was my mother. They loved her because for thirty-one years she was the one standing in the kitchen door with a plate when they did not know how they were going to get through the day. You will need to remember that about her. It matters later.

My father died when I was twenty-two, a heart attack in the hay field in July, gone before the ambulance could find the farm. After that it was just Mom in the farmhouse. She was tough, my mother, tough in the way the women of that generation were tough, the kind that never once called it toughness, it just called it Tuesday. But about nine years ago she started to shake. First just her right hand, and she laughed it off, said she was getting old, and then it was more than her hand, and the doctor two towns over said the word Parkinson’s and the floor sort of tilted under all of us.

Here is the part I need you to understand before I tell you about the plate. When the doctor said that word, there were two daughters in this family. And only one of us came home.

I did not decide it in some big noble moment. There was no moment. It happened a day at a time. Mom needed a ride to the appointment, so I drove her. Then she needed help with the childproof caps, so I went over in the mornings. Then she fell in the night and lay on the kitchen floor until I found her at six, cold and ashamed and trying to make a joke of it, and that was the night I packed a bag and moved back into my old bedroom with the window that looks at the ridge, and I did not move out again for seven years.