The Green Notes on My Furniture
“Mom, we took up the rugs like the discharge lady said so you won’t trip, and they’re rolled in the garage. Fresh milk and eggs in the fridge. We also got a few things organized while we were all here together, so nobody has to worry about it later. Love you. S.”
I read it twice.
Organized.
“They did take the rugs up,” Loretta said. She was a fair woman, and I could hear what it cost her. “And there’s milk.”
“When were they here?”
She got two cups down. She took her time about it.
“Saturday,” she said.
“All three?”
“Kevin’s pickup, Stacy’s van, and that little white car of Dawn’s. They were in the drive when I left to come see you. A little before ten.”
“And when you got back?”
“They were pulling out. Round about two.”
I looked at the clock on the stove, not because I needed the time, but because I needed something to look at.
Saturday at ten I had been in the therapy room at the hospital, one mile from that kitchen table, learning to go up four wooden steps with a rail and come back down. Up with the good leg. Down with the bad. Saturday at one, Loretta had been sitting on the end of my bed doing the crossword out loud and getting the answers wrong on purpose to make me laugh.
“I figured they were on their way to you,” Loretta said quietly. “I figured I’d pass them in the hall.”
“Nobody came Saturday but you.”
“I know it.”
Four hours. They had been in my house four hours, three grown people with three cars, and not one of them had driven the mile.
I want to be fair to my children, and I mean to be fair all the way through this. They had not been absent the whole time. Kevin drove over from Omaha the morning of the surgery and sat in the waiting room until the doctor came out, and then he went home because, he said, I would only be sleeping. Stacy came the first Sunday for twenty minutes and never took her coat off. Dawn called three times from Maryville and sent a pot of yellow mums. They are not wicked. I raised them, and I would know.
But I had been seventeen days out of my house, and the one day all three of them were in my town together, they spent it deciding who got my dining table.
Loretta set a cup in front of me.
“Call them,” she said. “Right now. I’ll dial it for you. You tell them to get over here and take every one of those down.”
“Not today.”
“Marjorie.”
“Loretta, I am seventeen days out of surgery and I can’t put my own sock on. I am too tired and too hurt to have that fight tonight. If I call now I’ll either cry or say something I can’t take back, and I won’t do either one to my children.”
She frowned at me.
“I want to know my own mind before I open my mouth,” I said. “That’s all. I’ll say it. I just want to say it right.”
Loretta looked at me for a while. Then she sat down across from me, and she did something she had not done since Walt’s funeral. She reached over and put her hand flat on top of mine.
“Then leave them up till you do,” she said.
So I did.
Walt would not have left them up. I thought about that a good deal in the first few days.