The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

Marv had come out behind me. He stood there a while with his cap back on.

“You did right,” he said.

“She went home with him, Marv.”

“She went home in her own car,” he said. “That’s different. That’s a whole different thing.” He was quiet a minute. “I should’ve done it at twelve. I should’ve handed Dad the broom.”

“You were a child.”

“So were you,” he said. “And you remembered.”

He went back in and washed every dish in my sink, which he had not done in four years of Sundays, and he dried the eleven wheat plates and put them in the cupboard one at a time.

I will not make the next eleven days sound braver than they were.

I turned the porch light on that night at dusk, and I did not sleep. I moved Dale’s pickup out of the garage and parked it by the machine shed so there would be an open stall, and I felt foolish doing it. I changed the sheets in Amanda’s old room and put the little quilt with the ducks on the cot for Ava.

Monday the light was on. Tuesday the light was on.

Wednesday I called her on her lunch hour at the dentist’s office, because I could not stand it. I had promised myself I would say nothing about him.

“How’s the Buick running?” I said.

“It’s fine, Mom.” A pause. “He told me to bring it back.”

My heart went into my shoes. “Did he.”

“I told him you said as long as I wanted it.” Another pause, and then something in her voice I had not heard in years, something almost like the girl with the garden hoe. “I drove myself to work today. I’d forgotten what the radio sounds like when you pick the station.”

I had to put my hand over the receiver.

“Well,” I said, when I could. “It’s got good speakers.”

That was all. I did not push. I hung up and sat at my kitchen table and looked at the shadow on the wall and prayed the only prayer I had in me, which was, Lord, keep that tank full.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Sunday they did not come to dinner. He had started stopping by in the evenings on his way in from the field, corn dust all over him, pretending he needed to borrow something. He never said why he was really there. He would look at the empty stall in the garage and then at me, and I would shake my head, and he would drink a cup of coffee standing up and go home.

Ten nights I turned that light on.

On the eleventh day, a Thursday, I was at the sink peeling apples for sauce when I heard gravel in the lane. The clock over the stove said twenty minutes to three.

It was my Buick.

The sun was on the windshield and I could not see in. I stood there with the paring knife in my hand and I could not make my feet go. If it was Shawn, bringing the car back with the keys to throw on my step, then I had my answer and it was the wrong one.

The driver’s door opened, and my daughter got out.

She was in her house clothes, an old sweatshirt and jeans, no coat. She opened the back door and Ava climbed out with her school backpack on and a stuffed rabbit under one arm. Then Amanda went around to the trunk and lifted out one suitcase, the blue one I gave her when she graduated high school.