The Invitations in the Mop Bucket
“Yes ma’am. That’s your invitation.”
There was a pause on the line. I could hear her kitchen clock.
“It’s ruined.”
“Yes ma’am. It’s the best one we had.”
“I don’t think that’s very funny.”
“I’m not being funny, Joanne. We’d love to have you. Two o’clock on the twenty-fourth.”
She breathed through her nose.
“I’m hearing things,” she said. “Peggy Otto wouldn’t hardly speak to me at the grocery store. I understand Bea has been going around.”
“Nana Bea’s been delivering invitations.”
“She’s been telling people I did it deliberately.”
“No ma’am. I’ve been standing right beside her at every door. She’s never said that once.”
Which was true. That was the whole beauty of it. Nana Bea never said one word about why. She only ever said where.
Joanne hung up on me. Politely. She said, “Well, I have something on the stove,” and then the line went dead.
By Thursday she had her own version going around town. I heard it from my mother, who heard it at the beauty shop. There had been an unfortunate accident, Joanne was just sick over it, and poor Bea was getting confused in her old age and had it all turned around. And that girl was letting her ride all over three counties in this heat, at eighty-four, which, if you asked Joanne, was the real cruelty in all this.
The second Saturday, we were at a gate way out toward Mason, waiting on a man to come unlock it, when Ian’s phone rang.
He looked at it. He got out of the truck and walked off a ways down the fence line with it against his ear.
I saw him take his cap off. I saw him put it back on. I saw him stand with his free hand on a cedar post and his head down for a long time, just listening, the way he has listened to her all his life.
When he came back his face was gray.
He opened the door but he didn’t get in.
“She wants me to bring you home, Nana. She says it’s too hot and you’re worn out. She says…” He stopped. “She says you’re mixed up about what happened, and I’m letting you make a spectacle of yourself, and if I had any respect for my daddy’s memory I’d turn this truck around.”
Nana Bea did not move. She had her pocketbook on her knees and her ankles crossed.
“Am I mixed up, Ian?”
He looked at her. He looked at her a long time, standing there in the white dust with the door open and the engine ticking.
“No ma’am,” he said.
“Was the box wet?”
His jaw worked.
“No ma’am. Kelsey says it wasn’t, and Mama never said it was. I asked her straight. She changed the subject.”
“Then get in and drive. Here comes Mr. Koenig with the key.”
He got in. He put both hands on the wheel.
Then he did something I had never once seen him do. He took his phone out of his shirt pocket, and he turned it all the way off, and he put it in the glove box.
It was the third door after that.
Brenda has sat next to Joanne in the altar guild for the better part of twenty years. They do the Easter lilies together. She lives in a brick house in town with a porch swing and a concrete goose that she dresses for the seasons, and that day the goose had on a little football jersey.