The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

One suitcase. That was everything.

I got to the back door before they did. I did not say a thing. I held the screen open, and my daughter walked through it with her child and her suitcase, and she set the suitcase down on my linoleum right about where the plate had landed, and then her face went to pieces.

I held her. She is thirty-three years old and I held her the way I did when she had the croup, standing up in the kitchen and rocking a little. Ava wrapped herself around both our legs.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda kept saying. “Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t stay.”

“Hush. You’re here.”

“I thought I could just be careful. I thought if I was careful enough.”

“I know you did. Your grandmother thought so for forty-one years.”

It was a while before she could tell me, and she waited until Ava was in the front room with a bowl of apple slices and the television on.

It was milk.

The night before, at supper, Ava had reached for the butter and knocked over her glass. A full glass of milk, all across the table and onto the floor. An ordinary thing. Every child who ever lived has done it.

“He hadn’t even said anything, Mom,” Amanda told me. She was holding a cup of coffee in both hands and not drinking it. “He hadn’t even looked up yet. And Ava went white as a sheet. She got down off her chair and she ran and got the broom.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“The broom. For milk. She’s seven, she didn’t even know it was the wrong thing. She dragged it back and she said, ‘I’ll sweep it, Daddy. I’ll sweep it, don’t be mad.’ And she was trying to sweep milk, and it was just going everywhere, and she was crying because it wouldn’t sweep.”

Amanda’s voice gave out. I waited.

“And he sat there,” she said. “He didn’t yell. He just sat there and watched her do it. And I looked at my little girl with that broom, and I thought, she saw Grandma hand it to him. And what she took from it was that somebody has to sweep, and it had better be her.”

She looked up at me.

“I was her, wasn’t I. At that table. I was Grandma on her knees.”

“You were,” I said. “And then you weren’t. You’re sitting in my kitchen.”

“I couldn’t have done it without the car.” She said it like a confession. “I want you to know that. I’d thought about leaving before. I’d think about it, and then I’d think, how? Call you to come get me, with him standing there? Walk to the highway with a second grader? I’d lie there and I couldn’t get past the driveway. And last night I lay there and the keys were on the hook by my own back door. I could see how it would go. He leaves for work at half past five. I pack one bag. I pick her up from school early. I just drive.”

“That’s all it was for,” I said. “I didn’t know if you would use it. I only wanted you to be able to.”

“You said you wouldn’t tell me what to do.”

“I didn’t. I’ve learned that much.”

I called Marv. I did not tell him to come. I only said, “The stall’s full.” He was in the middle of a field and he said, “Well, thank the Lord,” and I could hear him blow his nose over the noise of the combine.