The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

“What?” he said. “I’m supposed to act like it’s good? I work all week. I drive twelve miles over here on my one day. I’d like to be able to chew it.”

I looked at the gravy on my wall. It is painted a pale blue, and I rolled it on myself in 1996 with Dale holding the ladder and complaining.

And I thought about my mother.

My father threw things. I may as well say it. He was a hard worker and a deacon and nobody in Platte County would have believed it of him, but about four times a year something at the supper table would not suit him, and his plate would go on the floor or his coffee cup would go at the stove. He never laid a hand on any of us. He did not have to. He would get up and go out to the barn, and my mother would get down on her knees with a rag and a dishpan.

She did that for forty-one years. I watched her from the time I was smaller than Ava. My brother Marv and I would sit there with our hands in our laps while she picked pieces of crockery out from under the stove, and when she was done she would say, “Well. Eat your supper.” And we would.

She never once told him to clean it up. I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that she could.

And now here was a seven-year-old with her face hidden in her mother’s neck, learning it too. Right at my table. Off my mother’s plates.

No, I thought. Not in this kitchen.

I will tell you I thought about calling the sheriff. It went through my mind the way a truck goes by on the highway. But nobody had been touched. Nobody had even been threatened, not in any way a deputy could write down. A deputy would have driven out, taken a report on one broken plate in a house that was not even Shawn’s, and driven away again. And then my daughter and my granddaughter would have ridden home twelve miles to Platte Center in the cab of his truck, with him angrier than he had been when he came.

I was not going to send them down the road with that.

What I did do, I did that evening after they had gone. I took the calendar off its nail and wrote down the date and the hour and what he had done, in ink, and I took a picture of that wall with my telephone. I kept books for thirty-one years. I knew there would be a next time, and I knew that when it came my daughter would need more than her mother’s say-so.

There was another thing I could have done, and I had already done it once. Two years before, after a Fourth of July when he spoke to her in front of all of us like she was hired help, I got Amanda alone on my back step and I said, “You need to leave that man.” I said it just that flat.

She did not come to my house for three months. She did not bring Ava. She told me on the telephone that I had never liked him and that I did not know the first thing about her marriage.

So I knew what telling her would get me. I had tried pulling. All pulling does is make a person hold on harder to the thing you are pulling her away from.