The Duffel Bag on My Porch

“And what does Kaylee say?”

“Kaylee doesn’t say anything. Kaylee hasn’t said two words to me.” Her voice broke. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any idea? Three years, Mama. He’s the only one who ever stayed. I am thirty-eight years old. I work forty-four hours a week turning old people over in their beds and I come home smelling like it, and he was the one person on this earth who was glad to see me come through the door.”

“I’m glad to see you come through the door.”

“That’s not the same and you know it’s not.”

I did know it. I pulled out a chair and sat, because I thought she might sit if I did.

“I’m not going to tell you he’s a monster,” I said. “I don’t believe he is. I believe he’s a man who worked sixteen days straight and has a temper he never learned what to do with, and I believe that for a year he was good to you and decent to me. I can believe every bit of that and still say he cannot live in a house with that girl.”

“You’re making me choose.”

“No, ma’am. I am not. I’ve made my own choice, about my own house, and that’s all I’ve done. You’re a grown woman. If you want to go to Nevada tonight and be with him, I can’t stop you and I won’t try, and your room will be here when you come back. I mean that. I won’t say one cold word.”

She stared at me.

“But I’m asking you to leave Kaylee here if you go. I’m asking. I’ve got no right to make you.”

“You think I’d pick him over her.”

“I think you’re scared,” I said. “I think you’ve been scared since that baby was two years old. I was scared too, Missy, the first year after your daddy died. I used to set his place by accident and then stand there with the plate in my hand. Being alone in a house is a real thing. I’m not making light of it.”

She sat down then, hard, and put her face in her hands.

I got up and made the coffee and set a cup by her elbow, with the milk already in it the way she takes it, and I went out to gather the eggs so she could cry without her mother watching.

She did not go to Nevada that night. She did not eat supper with us either. That was Wednesday.

Thursday, about twenty after five, I was at the sink peeling potatoes when I saw his pickup.

He did not come up the lane. I will give him that. Wade had spoken to him that morning at the plant, and whatever Wade said, Trent had heard it. He pulled off on the county road by my mailbox, a good two hundred yards from the house, and shut the engine off and sat there.

Missy’s phone buzzed on the table.

She read it. She stood up. She took her keys off the hook by the mudroom door, though she did not need keys to walk two hundred yards, and I understood from that what she was thinking about.

“He just wants to talk, Mama.”

“I expect he does.”

“I’m only going to hear him out.”

“All right.”

I did not stand in the door. I had told her I would not stop her. I kept peeling, and my hands were not altogether steady.