The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

It was six o’clock on a June evening. There was plenty of daylight. But she did it like a person putting out a fire.

“Mom. Come home with me. Tonight. We’ll figure the tub out.”

“No.”

“Owen can sleep on the couch. He’d think it was camping.”

“Kimberly.” She only uses the whole thing when she means it. “I am not putting that boy out of his bed. And I am not going to be the reason you girls don’t speak. I’ve buried a husband. I am not going to bury my family too.”

“She is charging you to see where you’re walking.”

“She gets nervous about money. She always has. You remember how she was about her Halloween candy.” Mom tried to smile. “It’s only a little while, till my wrist is right. Then we’ll see.”

I opened my mouth, and she put her good hand flat on the table.

“Don’t make a fuss,” she said. “Please. I have to live here, Kim. You get to go home. I have to live here.”

So I did not make a fuss.

I am not proud of it. I want to say that plainly, because the rest of this story is going to make my son look brave, and he was. But the reason a ten-year-old had to be brave is that his mother was not.

I told myself I was respecting her wishes. I told myself a lot of things that summer, driving home down Highway 65 with the soybeans coming up green on both sides.

What I did instead was small. I came by more, and I brought Mom a little battery lamp from the dollar store, the kind you tap on the top, and I told her it did not run on Tracy’s electricity so nobody could say a word about it.

Tracy found it within the week.

“That’s fine,” she told me on the phone. “But if she’s got money for gadgets, I might need to look at room and board again.”

“I bought it. It was a dollar twenty-five.”

“Then you’re undermining me in my own house.” There was no heat in her voice at all. There never was.

Mom gave the lamp back to me that Sunday, and she would not take cash from me either.

And Mom got smaller.

I do not know how else to put it. She had always been a woman who took up a kitchen. She sang while she cooked. She talked to the radio. By the Fourth of July she moved through that ranch house like a guest who had overstayed, touching nothing, apologizing to the furniture.

One Thursday in July I came in the back door at about eight thirty in the evening. The sun was nearly down and the whole house was dim and blue. I thought nobody was home.

Then I saw her. She was in the recliner by the front window, in the last of the daylight, with her Bible open on her lap and her hands folded on top of it. Not reading. There was not enough light left to read.

“Mom? What are you doing sitting in the dark?”

“Oh, I’m just resting my eyes.”

“You were reading.”

“I was. It got away from me.” She closed the Bible. “I’ve already got three this week. I thought I’d just sit.”

There was a flashlight on the end table beside her. A little yellow plastic one. I picked it up.

“What’s this for?”

“The hallway,” she said. “At night. To get to the bathroom.”