The Pictures in the Church Kitchen

“They are only pictures, Amy,” Connie said from the porch. “Nobody is hurt.”

She had her arms folded over one of my father’s old sweatshirts, the gray one with paint on the cuffs, and she did not come down the steps.

There were four boxes on the curb strip in front of the house I grew up in. Banana boxes from the grocery store, the kind with the hand holes cut in the ends. My mother was looking up at me out of the nearest one. It was her wedding portrait, the oval one, 1973, lying on its back under the open sky with grit already on the glass.

Beside the boxes stood the wheeled garbage can. Beside the garbage can sat two more boxes, taped shut, with a sheet of notebook paper under a strip of tape on top.

Sold. Deb. Paid $60. Will pick up Thurs.

I knew what was in those two without lifting a flap. I could see the corner of the quilted zipper case my mother kept the dinner plates in.

Behind all of it stood Mrs. Tuttle. She was seventy-six years old and eight weeks out from a new hip, and she had walked her walker two doors down the sidewalk and planted it on the curb strip. She had one hand on the walker and the other flat on top of the nearest box, the way you would rest a hand on a child’s head in a parking lot.

“I told that young man he would have to go around me,” she said. “He has not come yet. But I told the air, to practice.”

That was how I found it, at ten minutes after ten on a Thursday morning in October.

Mrs. Tuttle had called me at work at nine fifty. I am the secretary at the middle school, and I answer that phone forty times a day, and I knew something was wrong because Lois Tuttle does not call anybody during school hours.

“Amy,” she had said, “I am looking out my front window, and there are boxes on your dad’s curb, and unless my eyes have gone the way of my hip, your mother’s wedding picture is sticking out of one of them.”

“It’s trash day,” I said. I remember saying that, as if I were telling her the time.

“I know what day it is, honey. That is why I am calling you and not writing you a letter.”

I told the principal I had a family matter and I drove the seven blocks faster than I have ever driven in the town of Seward, Nebraska.

Now I stood on my father’s lawn and looked up at his wife.

“Connie,” I said, “did Dad tell you to put these out?”

“Your dad doesn’t tell me to do much of anything. He’s at the elevator fifteen hours a day.” She shifted her weight. “I asked him twice to put some of them away. He said sure, we’ll get to it. So I got to it.”

“He thinks they’re in the spare room. He told me so. He said you took them down to paint.”

“I did take them down to paint.”

“And then?”

“And then I looked at those clean walls for two weeks,” Connie said, “and I could breathe.”

It was not meanness in her face exactly. It was the look of somebody who has made up her mind to get through a thing.

“You could have called me,” I said. “I live seven blocks from here. I would have come with the car and you would never have had to look at one of them again.”