The Two Bags My Mother Carried
The women from the quilting circle came with a quilt they had put together faster than any quilt has ever been made, I am sure of it, a double-wedding-ring in blues and yellows because somebody remembered yellow was her color, and they did not make a presentation of it, they just put it on the new bed and smoothed it down and had coffee and left. Pastor Gene from the Methodist church came and sat with her for an hour and prayed with her and did not once ask what had happened, which was its own kindness. The pharmacist in town, Donna, took over sorting Mom’s pills into the little day-of-the-week box for free when she heard, because she said she did not like the idea of Faye keeping track of her own heart medicine after the year she’d had. The high school boys who mow for the Fourth of July committee showed up and cleaned out my gutters and raked the whole yard, and I know for a fact their coach sent them, and I know for a fact the coach’s mother had been in my mother’s Sunday school class in 1974.
We turned the sunporch into her room. It is the nicest room in our house, honestly, the sunporch, it faces east over the little garden and it gets the morning light, and Russ and I had always kept it as a junk room, and in about two weeks it became my mother’s room, with Dot’s bed and the circle’s quilt and a recliner somebody donated and her photographs up on the walls in frames the girls at the craft store gave me at cost. We put my father’s carved bird on the windowsill where she could see it with the sunrise behind it. And slowly, over that fall, I watched my mother come back. Her hands stopped shaking. She started getting her color back. She started, around Thanksgiving, to boss me around my own kitchen again, which is how I knew she was going to be all right, when she told me I was ruining the stuffing.
Craig did not call. Not for weeks. I want you to sit with that. He drove his mother to another county and set her on a porch in the rain and then he did not call to see if she had even gotten inside. Dana’s mother came and went from the basement guest room. The boat sat under its cover for the winter. And forty minutes up the road my mother was being nursed back to being a person by a town full of people who were not even her blood, while her own son let the whole thing drop out of his mind like it had never been.