The Green Notes on My Furniture
“Yes,” Stacy said. “Yes. That’s where it ought to go.”
At two o’clock they started coming up the walk, and by then there was not a colored note in the house but green.
Connie and Barb and Jan. Pastor Tom and his wife. The Miller boy from two doors down, who had mowed my yard five Saturdays and would not take a dime, and his mother. The mail carrier, who had walked my mail to the door every day instead of leaving it in the box at the curb. Fourteen people in all, in my front room, eating scotcheroos off my good plates out of the china cabinet.
Pastor Tom read the arm of the recliner. He stood there a moment with his coffee.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve been called worse from that pulpit.” Then, quieter, to me alone: “Thank you, Marjorie. A man doesn’t often get told he did a small thing right.”
My children did not leave. I had half expected they would, and I would not have blamed them. But Kevin carried folding chairs in from Pastor Tom’s pickup, and Dawn stood at my sink for an hour washing cups as fast as they came back, and Stacy went around with the coffee pot. I saw her stop in front of Loretta.
I could not hear what she said. I saw Loretta listen with her head tilted, and then I saw Loretta Hobbs, who does not hug, pat my daughter twice on the forearm.
“You’ve got a key now,” I heard Stacy say. “Would you call me, too? If there’s ever anything? I’ll come. I’m nineteen miles. I can be here in twenty-five minutes.”
“I’ll call you,” Loretta said. “See that you pick up.”
They left about four, the children with the rest. Hannah hugged me at the door so hard my cane tipped.
“Was I wrong, Grandma? You said it wasn’t mine.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “But that one note was on your piano. I’d say you had standing.”
It was full dark, going on half past eight, when headlights swung across my front curtains.
I knew the sound of the engine. I got to the door on my cane and turned on the porch light, and there was Kevin, coming up the walk with his hands in his jacket pockets.
“I thought you’d be in Omaha by now.”
“I got as far as the interstate.” He stood on the step below me, which put us about eye to eye. “I sat on the shoulder a while. Then I turned around.”
“Come in out of the cold.”
He came in. He stood in the front room like a visitor, and he looked at his father’s chair.
“Mom. Can I sit in Dad’s chair?”
It went through me like warm water.
“You can,” I said.
He sat down slow, the way Walt used to after a day on the grader. I took the davenport. For a long time neither of us said anything.
“I didn’t tell it all this afternoon,” he said finally.
“All right.”
“That Saturday. When we left here. I didn’t go straight home.” He was looking at his hands. “I drove to the hospital. I pulled in the lot, in the row by the therapy doors, and I shut the truck off. And I sat there. Ten minutes, maybe.”
I waited.