The Maid Out Back Was My Mother
A man at the back took off his cap and held it.
“You told me your sister had given up on me. That was the cruelest thing. Not the cot. That.” Her voice wavered, and then it held. “I am not the maid. I am your mother, and this is my house, and I want you and your husband to carry your own bags out of it before supper.”
Nobody breathed.
“And I want you to know I love you,” my mother said. “I’ll love you on the day I die. But you’ll knock on that door from now on, like company.”
She turned around.
She looked at the woman with the silver bob, who had both hands over her mouth.
“Now,” my mother said, “I believe you wanted ice.”
The woman was up out of her chair before my mother could take a step.
“You will not,” she said. Her name, I learned, was Linda, and she had taught second grade in Nixa for twenty nine years. “You will sit down right here in my seat, Helen, and I will get the ice, and I will get you a plate. Bob, move over.”
Bob moved over.
It broke the room open. Chairs scraped. The man with the gray mustache came and shook my mother’s hand in both of his, and told her his own mother had cleaned rooms at a motor court in Lebanon to put him through school, and that he was ashamed he had let her hold a door for him.
I had expected them to leave. I think Jessica had expected them to stay and be embarrassed for her, quietly, the way people are.
They did neither. They ate my mother’s casserole, and they asked her for the biscuit recipe, and three different women wrote their phone numbers on a napkin for her. One of them invited her to a Tuesday Bible study. Linda asked her straight out if she had ever played golf, and when my mother said no, of course not, Linda said, “Well, the ladies’ nine hole group goes out Thursday mornings, and we’re all terrible, and you live right on the course.”
My mother laughed. I had not heard her laugh in person in six years. It was the same laugh.
Trent and Jessica did not sit back down.
For a while they stood by the fireplace, the two of them, while his golf league ate lunch around the woman they had called the maid. I watched Trent try to catch the eye of the man he had been on the phone with that morning. The man was busy passing my mother the butter.
A little after two, they went inside.
I did not follow them. I did not need to supervise it. Through the glass I saw Jessica come down the stairs with a suitcase in each hand and a garment bag over her shoulder, and Trent behind her with two duffels and a box. They made four trips. Nobody helped them, and nobody stopped them.
On the last trip Jessica paused at the patio door. She did not open it. She looked through the glass at our mother, sitting at a round table with a plate in front of her and a cloth napkin in her lap, with Linda on one side and me on the other.