The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

I got up from the table.

I did not hurry. I pushed my chair in. I went to the broom closet next to the refrigerator and took out my corn broom with the red handle. By the time I turned around, Shawn had gotten up too. He had carried his tea glass to the sink, and he stood there with his back to all of us, looking out my window at the machine shed.

I held the broom out toward him at arm’s length.

“You will sweep that up,” I said.

I did not raise my voice. I have never been a woman who hollers and I was not going to start for him. I said it the way I used to tell a farmer his account was ninety days past due: pleasant, and not going anywhere.

He did not turn around.

“I’m not sweeping your floor, Glenda.”

“It isn’t my mess,” I said. “I didn’t make it.”

“You made the roast.”

“I did. And you can say it was dry. You can leave it on your plate. But you threw my mother’s plate at my wall in front of your daughter, and you are going to clean it up.”

“Mom,” Amanda whispered. “Mom, don’t. I’ll get it. It’s fine.”

She had started to shift Ava off her lap. She was already half up. That was what broke my heart, how fast she moved, how well she knew the way to the dishrag.

“Sit down, honey,” I said. “Hold your girl.”

She sat.

Shawn laughed at the window, one short breath through his nose. “You’ve lost your mind,” he said.

“That may be,” I said. I kept the broom where it was.

A moment later the mudroom door opened.

Marv had gone out to my deep freeze for the ice cream. He is my older brother by three years, sixty-six then, and he has eaten Sunday dinner at my table every week since Dale passed, partly to keep me company and partly, I think, because a bachelor gets tired of his own cooking. He farms the home place over by Shell Creek. It was the first Sunday in October and he had four hundred acres of corn standing, but Marv does not run a combine on Sunday and never has. He says our mother would rise up.

He came and stood in the doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen with a gallon pail of vanilla ice cream hanging from one hand.

He did not say a word. Marv has bucked bales and pulled calves all his life and he fills up a doorway without meaning to, but he did not square up or make a fist. He looked at the wall. He looked at the food on the floor. He looked at Ava in her mother’s lap. Then he set the ice cream on the counter, took off his seed cap, and held it in both hands, the way he does at a graveside.

I would like to tell you that was what did it. It was not. Shawn glanced over his shoulder at Marv and turned back to the window. A man who will throw a plate in his mother-in-law’s kitchen does not pick up a broom because an old farmer takes his cap off. I stood there with my arm beginning to ache, and I understood I might stand there until dark.

It was Ava.

She lifted her head off her mother’s shoulder. She looked at the food on the floor, and then at her father’s back.