The Two Bags My Mother Carried
My mother’s name is Faye. My father was Harold, and he farmed a hundred and sixty acres of corn and beans out on Tanner Road until his heart gave out in the cab of his combine six years ago this fall. They found him at the end of a row with the engine still running. He was sixty-nine. My mother was in that farmhouse alone after that, the house she had been a bride in and a mother in and a widow in, and for a while she managed, because she is a managing kind of woman. She kept a garden that fed half the road. She drove herself to church and to the Tuesday quilting circle and to the Kroger over in the county seat for the things the IGA did not carry. She was fine.
I have a brother. His name is Craig, and he is three years younger than me, and I love him, or I loved him, or I do not know what the right word is anymore for what I feel about my brother. Craig got out. That is how he would say it, like Birchard was a trap and he chewed his own leg off. He went to Lansing and did well in commercial real estate for a while and then not so well, and he married a woman named Dana who sells houses and wears the kind of clothes you cannot buy anywhere within fifty miles of here, and they have a big house in a subdivision with a name, and they have a boy, Tyler, who was fifteen that fall and who I will come back to, because Tyler is the one who matters most in the end.
When Daddy died, it was Craig who brought it up. We were cleaning out the barn, the two of us, and he leaned on the tailgate and said Mom could not stay out on Tanner Road by herself forever, and he was right, she could not, I knew that. And then he said he and Dana had been talking, and they had the room, and the schools were better for Mom to be near good doctors, and Lansing had specialists, and would it not make the most sense for her to come live with them. He had a finished basement with its own bathroom. He said he would build it out into a little apartment, a mother-in-law suite, he called it, and she would have her own space and her family around her and the grandbaby right upstairs. He made it sound like the kindest thing a son had ever thought of.