The Pictures in the Church Kitchen
I had not thought about any of it from the inside of that house.
“At church I am Harold’s wife. Nobody is unkind. Everybody is so careful. They tell me the coffee is good. They tell me Marilyn used to put an egg in it.” She gave a little laugh that was not a laugh. “I am sixty-six years old. I buried a husband of thirty-nine years. And I felt like the hired girl in another woman’s house, and I got to where I could not stand one more day of it.”
“You could have told me that,” I said. It came out gentler than I expected.
“Could I?” she said. “You’re her daughter.”
I had no answer to that.
“When Roger died,” Connie said, “his kids from the first marriage came to my house with a pickup the week after the funeral. They were within their rights. It was their father’s things. They took the pictures off my walls with the nails still in the frames. I have got one picture of that man, and it is in my billfold, because it was in my billfold the day they came.” She pressed the tissue to her mouth. “So I know just what I did to you, Amy. I knew it Thursday while I was doing it. I think I wanted somebody else to find out what it felt like to be left with clean walls.”
The kitchen was quiet. The furnace came on.
“And when you offered to say I had called you,” she said. “On the lawn. I wanted to come down those steps so bad. I just could not make my feet do it in front of Lois Tuttle.”
My father reached across the table and put his hand over hers. He did not say it was all right. It was not all right, and he is not a man to say a thing that isn’t so. He just covered her hand.
“I am sorry,” Connie said to me. “I am sorry about your mother’s pictures, and I am sick about the dishes. I do not know how to fix the dishes.”
I thought about my note under the tape.
“I might,” I said.
Deb called me that same night at a quarter to eight.
She had found my note when she and her husband loaded the boxes. She said she had read it in the pickup and had not been able to unpack them since. They were sitting on her dining room floor in Utica, still taped.
“I thought there was nobody left to want them,” she said.
I told Connie the next morning. I half expected her to ask me to handle it.
“No,” she said. “I sold them. I’ll go get them. Will you ride along? I do not know Utica and I do not trust myself to say it right.”
So on Tuesday afternoon my father’s wife and I drove the twelve miles west on Highway 34, past fields picked down to stubble,. We did not say much. Around Tamora she opened her purse and took out her billfold and handed it to me, open.
It was a snapshot behind the plastic window. A heavyset man in a seed cap, grinning, holding up a channel cat as long as his arm.
“That’s Roger,” she said. “Harlan County Reservoir. 1996.”
“He looks like he was fun.”