The Two Bags My Mother Carried
My brother promised to take care of our mother then left her on my porch in the rain with two grocery bags
It was the first cold rain of October, the kind that comes down straight and steady and makes the whole county smell like wet leaves and diesel, and I almost did not hear the knock over the dishwasher. I had my hands in a sink full of suds. Russ was in the front room with the television turned up too loud, the way he does when his ears are tired from the plant. And when I finally shut off the water and heard it again, three soft taps, so light they might have been a branch against the glass, I dried my hands on my jeans and went to the door thinking it was nothing at all.
My mother was standing on the porch in the rain.
She had no coat. She was in a thin housecoat, the pale yellow one with the little daisies that she had worn around the house for twenty years, and it was soaked through and stuck to her. She had her good pink slippers on, the ones I gave her two Christmases ago, and they were black with water. At her feet were two brown paper grocery bags, the kind from the IGA with the handles, and they had gone soft and dark at the bottom from the rain, and I remember thinking, in the half second before anything else, that they were going to give way and spill.
She looked up at me. She is seventy-four. Her white hair was flat against her head and water was running off the end of her nose, and she smiled at me the way she has smiled at me my whole life, like she was sorry to be a bother.
“Hi, baby,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
I am going to tell you this whole thing, start to finish, because I have told it in pieces to too many people and it keeps coming out wrong, coming out like a thing to be angry about, and it is not that. It is a thing about my mother, and I want to get it right.
My name is Maggie. I am forty-eight years old and I have lived my whole life inside a twenty-mile circle of county roads in the middle of Michigan, around a little farm town called Birchard that you have never heard of and never will. We have a feed store, a diner, two churches, a school that goes K through twelve under one roof, and a stoplight that the state put in forty years ago and that most people still treat as a suggestion. I waitress at Dot’s, the diner, four mornings and two nights a week. I have done it for nineteen years. Russ, my husband, runs a line at the plastics plant one town over. We raised two kids in a little ranch house on Pruitt Road, and they are grown now, and it is just us and the dog and a freezer full of venison most winters. That is my life. It is a small one and I am not ashamed of it.