The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

“Daddy,” she said, in a very small voice. “Are you going to clean it up?”

She was not being smart. She was asking. She wanted to know how this went in a house where it was not her mother on the floor.

I saw his shoulders come up. He stood that way a long count. Then he turned around, and he did not look at me or at Marv. He looked at his little girl, and whatever he saw in her face, he could not stand in front of it.

He took the broom out of my hand so hard it burned my palm.

He went at that mess like he was killing snakes. He swept badly and he swept furious, short hard jabs that sent carrots under my pantry door.

“There’s a dustpan on the nail,” I said.

He got the dustpan.

“The big pieces go in the trash under the sink. Mind your fingers on that plate.”

He picked up the pieces of my mother’s plate. There was a moment when he had the biggest piece in his hand, the one with most of the wheat sheaf still on it, and he looked at it a second longer than he needed to. Then it went in the trash with the rest.

“There’s a rag in the bucket for the wall,” I said. “Cold water, or you’ll set the grease.”

He wiped my wall. It did not come clean. There is a shadow there yet, about the size of a pie tin, beside the pantry door, and I have decided not to paint over it.

I will say this plainly: it settled nothing. A man sweeping a floor in a temper is not a changed man. He was as angry when he finished as when he started, maybe angrier. But a child had asked a question and seen it answered, and that was all I was after that day.

Nobody spoke the whole time. I sat back down, because my knees had started to go.

Then Ava looked across the table at me with those gray eyes she got from Dale.

“I liked it, Grandma,” she whispered. “I liked the roast.”

I nearly came apart. I want you to know that. I had held together through the plate and through the broom, and a seven-year-old telling me my dinner was good, in a whisper so her father would not hear, nearly finished me right there at the table.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “There’s more, when you want it.”

Shawn dropped the rag in the bucket. He leaned my broom against the wall, not in the closet, just against the wall, and he wiped his hands on his jeans.

“We’re going,” he said. “Amanda. Get her coat.”

And here is the second thing I did that day, and it is the one that mattered.

By my back door there is a board with four brass hooks on it that Dale screwed into the wall the week we moved in. My keys hang on the first hook. They have hung there for close to forty years. I stood up, and I took the keys to my Buick off that hook, and I walked around the table and set them in my daughter’s hand.

I need to explain about the car.

Amanda had a Malibu. In March the transmission went out of it, and the shop in Columbus wanted twenty-eight hundred dollars. Shawn said they could not afford it, and maybe they could not. His hours at the fabrication shop had been cut to thirty-two a week in August, and I knew the payment on his pickup was six hundred and forty dollars a month, because Amanda had let it slip once. I am not saying he had no worries. A man with a truck payment and short hours has worries.