The Woman He Called No Fun

It still had the smell of the cedar block my mother kept in with it. It was a young woman’s dress and I was not a young woman, and I held it up against me in the mirror and I braced for it to look like a sad joke. It did not. It looked like a door.

The next morning I called my mother.

Glenda Reese is seventy-one years old and she has buried a husband and a daughter and she does not waste words. I sat in the truck in the church parking lot while Eli slept in his seat and I told her everything, the kitchen and the sad sack and the year of it, all of it, and when I was done she was quiet a minute.

Then she said, “Dana Ruth. Do you remember the anthem at the ball field? Do you remember how that whole town used to go still for you?”

I said I did.

“That was never about Greg Tolliver,” she said. “You had that before you ever met that boy and you’ll have it after, if you quit handing it to him to carry. He didn’t take your voice, honey. You set it down. Now I need you to go pick it back up, because I am too old to watch you turn into me.”

I have thought about that phone call more times than I can count. I am too old to watch you turn into me. My mother gave her whole self to a house and a family and a church and she did it gladly, but there was a cost, and she paid it in a hard closed mouth and a song she sang quieter every year, and she had watched me starting down the same road and she could not stand it.

That was the beginning of me coming back. Not all at once. A little at a time, the same way it had gone out of me.

I started humming at the sink again. Lucy noticed first. “You’re singing, Mommy,” she said, like she had seen a bird she thought was extinct, and something in the way she said it broke my heart and put it back together at the same time.

I called Tammy Reece, who had kept singing all these years at church and at the Grange and who had asked me to come back so many times I had quit hearing it. I told her I was ready. She did not say I told you so. She said, “Thank God,” and she cried a little, and then she said, “You better not chicken out, because I have been waiting twenty years.”

We started practicing on Tuesday nights at Tammy’s, after I got the kids down and Maddie came out from Ivy Tech to sit with them. The first night my voice cracked and shook and I was so out of practice I could not hold a line, and I sat down on Tammy’s couch and said maybe this was foolish, maybe Greg was right, maybe I was too old and too far gone. And Tammy, who has known me since the second grade, looked at me and said, “He is not right. He has never once in his life been right about you. Now sing it again.”