The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

The plate hit the wall beside my pantry door at ten minutes to two on a Sunday afternoon, and for a moment the only sound in my kitchen was gravy sliding down my blue wall.

It was one of my mother’s wheat plates. She collected them one at a time out of boxes of Duz detergent in the 1950s, a plate or a saucer in every box, and she had twelve dinner plates by the time I was born. I had eaten off those plates every Sunday of my life.

Now there were eleven.

“That roast is dry as a boot,” my son-in-law said.

He said it calmly. That was the part that went through me. Shawn did not shout it. He did not even stand up. He had picked up a full plate of the dinner I had cooked, turned a little in his chair, and thrown it the way you would toss a feed sack into a pickup bed. Then he reached for his iced tea.

Potatoes and carrots lay on my linoleum. A slice of chuck roast had stuck to the wall for a second and then let go.

My granddaughter Ava is seven years old. She had been sitting on the phone books I keep on the chair by the window so she can reach the table. She slid off them without a sound, walked around the corner of the table, and climbed up into her mother’s lap. She did not cry. She tucked her head under Amanda’s chin and went still, like a rabbit in tall grass.

And my daughter looked down at her own plate.

That is what I remember most about that afternoon. Not the crash. Not the stain. I remember that Amanda, who is thirty-three years old and who once chased a neighbor boy off our place with a garden hoe for kicking a barn cat, did not look surprised.

She looked tired. She looked like a woman waiting for weather to pass.

That told me this was not the first plate.

My name is Glenda. I was sixty-three that fall. I live on an acreage a few miles north of Columbus, Nebraska, in the house my husband Dale and I bought in 1987. I kept the books at the co-op elevator for thirty-one years. Dale drove a propane truck and farmed our eighty acres on the side, and four years ago in March his heart quit on him in the machine shed while he was changing the oil in that truck. So there was no man at the head of my table that Sunday. There was his chair, and I had quit setting a place at it the second year.

I should also say the roast was a little dry.

I am not going to pretend otherwise. I put a three and a half pound chuck roast in the oven at eight o’clock that morning, before church, the way I have done for forty years, with the potatoes and carrots and an onion around it. Dinner was supposed to be at noon. Shawn and Amanda and Ava pulled into the lane at ten after one. I had held that roast in a warm oven for more than an hour past its time, and I knew when I sliced it that it had gone past tender and into stringy.

So the roast was dry. I will give him the roast.

I will not give him the plate.

“Shawn,” Amanda said, very quietly, to her mashed potatoes.

He was thirty-five then, in a gray T-shirt, because he had not gone to church with us.