The Pictures in the Church Kitchen
I went through that fourth box twice. It was not there. I decided it had gone out with the trash some other Thursday, when Lois Tuttle did not happen to be at her window, and I had to stand still a moment with my hand on the roof of the car.
“What is it?” Mrs. Tuttle said.
“Nothing. It’s nothing I can fix today.”
Then I looked at the china.
I wanted to put those two boxes in my car more than I have wanted most things. Nobody would have stopped me.
But it was sold. Somebody named Deb had paid her money in good faith, and she did not know any of us from Adam. My mother did not raise me to take what another woman had paid for, not even when it was hers to begin with.
So I tore a sheet out of the notepad in my purse and I wrote on it.
This was my mother’s wedding china. Her name was Marilyn. If you ever decide you do not want it, please call me first. I will pay whatever you ask. Amy. And my number.
I slid it under the tape, beneath Connie’s note, where it would not blow away.
The garbage truck came around the corner while I was closing the hatch. It was a young man on the back, twenty-two or so, with a ball cap on backward. He hopped down and tipped the can, and then he looked at the two taped boxes, and at Mrs. Tuttle and her walker, and at me.
“Those going, ma’am?”
“No sir,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “Those are spoken for. And the rest of it has already gone home.”
He touched his cap to her.
Then I sat in my car in front of Mrs. Tuttle’s house and called the scale house at the co-op. I told the girl it was Harold’s daughter, that nobody was hurt, and would he call me when he could get to a phone.
He rang back in four minutes from the office. I could hear the printer spitting out weight tickets and men talking behind him.
“Sis? What is it?”
“I have Mom’s pictures, Dad. All of them. They’re at my house and they’re safe. I wanted you to know where they were.”
“Well, good,” he said. “Connie’s been painting. You hang onto them till the walls are dry.”
He thought she had boxed them up for me out of the spare room. I let him think it for three more days, and I will tell you why. There were six farmers at that counter waiting on their tickets. The rest of it, the curb and the garbage can and the shut door, a man ought to hear sitting down, from somebody who can see his face.
That night I spread them out on my dining room table, and on the chairs, and on the piano bench, and on the floor along the wall.
My husband Mike came in from work and stopped in the doorway with his lunch box still in his hand.
“That’s all of them,” he said. It was not a question.
“Thirty-one.”
He set the lunch box down and picked one up. Mom and Dad on the front step of that same house in 1975, her in a sundress, him squinting, a new aluminum storm door behind them with the sticker still on the glass.
“Does Harold know?”
“He knows I have them. He doesn’t know how I got them. I’m going out there tonight.”