The Pictures in the Church Kitchen
“You missed one,” he said to her. Quietly. There was no cruelty in it. “It’s been in the bottom drawer of my workbench since the week after her funeral. I couldn’t have it in the house and I couldn’t have it gone. I go out and look at it some nights when you think I’m sharpening mower blades.”
Connie had turned around at last. She was looking at the album, not at him.
“I ought to have told you that,” he said. “That’s mine to answer for. But I never once told you to throw her away.” He put his cap on. “Get your coat. I’m taking you home, and we are going to sit down at the table. Amy, you come at two. It’s your mother. You’ve a right to hear it.”
He slid the album across the counter to Mrs. Tuttle.
“Keep that here for me till I come for it, Lois. It’s safer.”
The house smelled of fresh paint. The hallway was a pale gray now, and it was a pretty color, and there were thirty-one nail holes in it, filled and sanded smooth.
They were at the kitchen table when I came in. Dad had changed into a work shirt. He was due at the elevator at four. Connie still had her church dress on, and a wad of tissue in her fist, and she had plainly been crying a good while.
There was a pot of coffee on the table and three cups. Nobody had poured.
“Sit down, sis,” Dad said.
I sat.
“I’ve said my piece to Connie already, and I’ll say it again in front of you so there’s no two versions.” He laid his hands flat on the table. They are big hands, cracked at the knuckles from fifty harvests. “What she did was wrong. Not the wanting to. I can understand the wanting to. The doing of it, behind my back, on a day she knew I couldn’t see. And the china. Selling a dead woman’s wedding dishes off a card table for sixty dollars and not a word to her daughter.”
Connie flinched at dead woman. He saw it and kept going, not louder.
“I told her nothing more of Marilyn’s leaves this house unless you’ve been asked first, Amy. Not a dish towel. And I told her that if she can’t live with that, I’ll understand it, and I’ll help her find a place, and I’ll be sorrier than I can say. But that’s the rule.”
“Harold,” Connie said.
“I’m not finished. Then you can have the floor as long as you want it.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table. “I also told her I did her wrong. She asked me in the spring to put some of those pictures away and I said sure and did nothing. Asked me again in August. Same answer. I thought if I didn’t look at the problem it would get tired and go lie down. That’s on me. A man who won’t have the hard talk in August gets a worse one in October.”
Then he sat back.
“Go on, Connie. Tell her what you told me.”
She took a while. She smoothed the tissue out on the table and folded it into a square.
“Thirty-one,” she said. “I counted them when I took them down. Your mother was in the hallway and the living room and on the piano and on the refrigerator and on the nightstand on his side of the bed. I would get up at night for a glass of water and walk past eleven of her.” She looked at me then, and her eyes were raw. “Her handwriting is on the freezer tape in the basement. Sweet corn, 2022. I thawed a bag in July and stood there and could not put it in the pot.”