The Green Notes on My Furniture

They came together, all three cars within a minute of each other. Kevin, forty-four, in a clean shirt, a big man gone a little soft, with his father’s hands. Stacy, forty-one, with her purse held in front of her. Dawn, thirty-eight, the baby, who had cried the hardest at Walt’s funeral.

I was standing by the piano on my cane. I had made sure to be standing.

They came in the door and stopped on the mat, all three, just about where I had stopped a month before.

Every note was still up. Nine blue, eight yellow, six pink. And the green ones right alongside them.

“Mom,” Stacy said. Her voice came out thin. “You really did leave them. All this time.”

“I told you I would,” I said. “I didn’t put them up.”

Nobody moved for a moment.

Then Dawn, who has never been able to pass a thing without reading it, went to the dining table. She bent down.

“Connie, Barb, Jan,” she read. “Eight suppers. Jan did my…”

She did not finish. She put the back of her hand against her mouth.

Kevin had gone to the recliner. Of course he had. He stood there with his hands hanging and looked at the two notes side by side on the arm, his blue K and my green square. I watched him read it. I watched him read it again. A grown man’s ears can still go red, it turns out.

“Asked before he sat,” he said, very low. Not to me. To the chair.

Stacy had found the hall table and the couch. She turned around.

“Hannah slept in her shoes?”

Hannah was on the piano bench with her hands in her lap. She did not answer her mother. She looked at me, and I gave her the smallest shake of my head. Not yours to fix.

“Mom,” Kevin said. He turned to face me, and I will give him this, he looked me in the eye. “This wasn’t what it looks like. Nobody was taking anything. Nothing left this house.”

“I know that.”

“It was me. It was my idea, don’t put it on the girls.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You remember Uncle Gene and Uncle Dale. After Grandma died. Eleven years, Mom. Eleven years Dad’s brothers didn’t speak, over a kitchen table and a shotgun that wasn’t worth two hundred dollars. Dad used to say it was the dumbest thing he ever saw two grown men do.”

“He did say that.”

“And then you went in for that hip, and the doctor’s talking about falls, and I got to thinking. I thought, we’re all three here anyway getting the rugs up. Let’s get it settled now, the three of us, friendly, while we all still like each other. So there’s never a fight.” He spread those hands. “I called it getting organized. I thought I was being the responsible one.”

That was the reason, and I believed it. I believe it now. It is a real reason. Walt’s brothers went eleven years, and Gene was buried without Dale in the church.

“I know what you were trying to do,” I said. “And I thank you for the rugs. I thank you for the milk. I drank it.”

Dawn made a small sound.

“But Gene and Dale fought over their mother’s things after she was dead,” I said. “I was a mile from here, Kevin. I was at the hospital in a pair of gripper socks, learning to climb four steps. You were in my house four hours. All three of you. And nobody drove the mile.”