The Plate My Sister Threw Over My House

I did not sweep them up for three days. I think a part of me needed to keep looking at it.

Now here is where the story my sister told and the story that was true went to war. Diane got home to Harrisburg and got on the phone, and the version that went around was that she and I had “had words,” that I had “screamed” at her, that I had “thrown her out of the family home,” that it was all so upsetting that “poor Shelby was in tears.” She even made her own daughter’s weeping into a weapon against me. She told people I was unstable, that she feared for Shelby around me. She was laying groundwork: if she could make the family believe I was the volatile one, the vulture, maybe they would pressure me to sell.

For about three months it worked. That is the hard truth. The phone did not ring, or when it rang it was somebody from the family asking in a careful voice if I was “doing all right,” which is the voice people use when they have been told you are not well. Dale would not speak to me, and neither would two of my cousins. At church, which my mother had held up with her own two hands for thirty-one years, I felt a coolness in certain pews, a turning of certain shoulders, and that was the one that nearly broke me, because that church was my mother, and to feel it turn even a little was to feel her turn, and she was not even there to defend me.

But here is what my sister did not understand, having been gone for thirty years. In a town like ours the truth does not travel fast, but it travels sure, and it travels through the women, through the church kitchen and the quilting circle and the line at the feed store, and my mother had spent thirty-one years making friends in exactly those places, and those friends had not forgotten who Ruth was, or what she had said with her own mouth about who stayed.

And she did not understand her own daughter.

The thing came to its head on the first anniversary of my mother’s death. The church ladies, Dot Kreider chief among them, decided to do a memorial dinner for Mom at the fire hall, the biggest room in Benner’s Creek and the only one that will hold the whole town, and they would do it the way Ruth would have, the ham and the scalloped potatoes and the green beans and the sheet cakes, and anybody who had loved her could come. It was a beautiful idea. It was a very dangerous idea, as it turned out, although nobody meant it to be.

Diane came. Of course she came. She would not have missed the chance to be seen grieving her mother in front of the whole town. She brought Craig and Shelby, and she worked that room like a woman running for office, and I watched from over by the coffee urns where I was helping Dot, and I felt sick, because I could see it working, the heads tilting sympathetically, the hands on her arm.

And then, after the meal, Dot Kreider got up to say a few words about Ruth, because somebody had to, about the church kitchen and the thirty-one years and the green beans, and the whole room was soft and teary, and then Diane, who cannot stand to not be the center of a room, stood up from her table and said, “May I?”