The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

I knew the coat before I knew the woman inside it.

It was the first Sunday of Advent and nineteen degrees, and I was in the vestibule of St. Joseph’s hanging my own coat on one of the hooks, the way you do at our church, because the pews are narrow and Father Paul keeps the furnace high once it finally catches up. I had my arm half out of my sleeve when I saw camel wool going past the holy water font.

Long. Belted. A little worn at the left cuff, where a woman rests her wrist on a steering wheel for thirty-five winters.

My mother bought that coat at the J.C. Penney in Norfolk in 1991. It cost one hundred forty dollars, and she told that number for years the way other women tell what they paid for a car. It was the most she ever spent on herself in one go. She had it relined once, in 2009, by a lady in Wisner who did alterations out of her sunporch. She wore it from the first cold Sunday in October until Easter, and she never once wore it to the grocery store.

It was her Sunday coat. That was its whole name.

And on the first Sunday of Advent, six weeks after we carried my mother out the doors of that same church, it was on Darla.

Darla is my father’s lady friend. That is the town’s word for it, not mine. I had not settled on a word yet. She was 68, a widow from over at Beemer, with short hair gone gray under an auburn rinse she had not quite given up on, and she had started bringing casseroles to my father’s kitchen the week of the funeral and had never quit.

She saw me see it.

“Rachel,” she said. Her hand went up to the collar. “Good morning. Isn’t it bitter out.”

“It is,” I said.

“Your dad said I’d freeze in what I had on.” She gave a small laugh that did not have much air in it. “It was just hanging there.”

It was hanging on the hook by my mother’s back door. The second hook, between Dad’s chore coat and the flyswatter. It was hanging there because that is where my mother hung it on a Sunday in October when she came home from nine o’clock Mass, and nobody had moved it until my father did that morning. I had walked past it thirty times in six weeks. I had not been able to make my hand go out and touch it.

My father was standing at the font with his cap in both hands. He is 73. He farmed two hundred forty acres north of town until his knees quit, and he was married to my mother for forty-nine years. He had dipped his fingers and crossed himself and then he had just stayed there, turning that seed corn cap around by the bill, looking at the floor tile.

He knew. I want to be fair to him. I could see from across the vestibule that somewhere between his back door and the church door he had worked out what he had done, and he did not know how to undo it with people watching.