The Green Notes on My Furniture
My husband ran a motor grader for the county for thirty-three years and he was not a talker. If he had come home to find notes on his furniture, he would have gone through the house with those big square hands and taken down every one, folded them into his shirt pocket, and handed the stack to Kevin the next time he saw him without one word of explanation. And Kevin would have understood, and that would have been the end of it.
But Walt has been gone four years this November, and I am not Walt. I could not do it his way. I had to find my own.
I bought that china cabinet with him in 1994. We drove down to Jamesport, Missouri, on a Saturday, to an Amish man who built them one at a time in a shop that smelled of sawdust and lamp oil. Solid red oak, glass doors, a lighted hutch. Twenty-four hundred dollars. Walt counted it out of an envelope in hundreds and I thought I would be sick. It was the most money we ever spent on anything that did not have an engine in it.
Now it had a blue K on the glass.
The first week home was a string of small humiliations. The raised seat on the toilet. A plastic gadget for pulling on my own sock. It was my right hip, so I could not drive, and would not be cleared to for a month or better.
It took me three days to know what I wanted to say, and it was not much. Monday noon I called Stacy at the credit union in Shenandoah.
“I saw the notes,” I said. “All twenty-three.”
The line went so quiet I could hear a drawer shut somewhere behind her.
“Mom,” she said, very small. “Oh, Mom. We shouldn’t have done it that way.”
“I’m not ready to talk about it. I’m not strong enough yet, and I want to do it right. Leave them where they are. Tell your brother and sister. I’ll call the three of you when I’m ready.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Not yet, Stacy. I’ll call.”
Kevin rang that night. “Mom, I can explain it,” he said, and I told him I expected he could, and not yet. After that they phoned every few days and asked about the hip, and none of us said the word notes.
Outpatient therapy started the Tuesday after I came home, three mornings a week at the hospital. I had not arranged a ride.
At a quarter past eight that Tuesday there was a horn in my driveway. One short tap, polite. Loretta’s tan Buick.
“I can’t have you doing this three times a week,” I told her, getting myself in backward the way they teach you, seat first, then the legs.
“I’m seventy-four years old and I have a full tank of gas,” Loretta said. “What else am I going to do with either one?”
On the way home I asked her to stop at Hy-Vee.
“I’ll run in. What do you need?”
“I’ll go in. They want me walking.”
It took me ten minutes to get to the aisle where they keep the school supplies. Blue, yellow and pink were all there, and I left them where they hung.
I took a pack of green ones. Three dollars and twenty-nine cents.
“What are those for?” Loretta asked at the register.
“I’m getting organized,” I said.