The Locks I Changed on My Mother
She did help with the baby. I want to be fair. She also ran her finger along the top of the refrigerator.
Within a month it had a routine to it. My mother lives eleven blocks from us. She would park at the curb at about two minutes to six, come up the driveway, and let herself in the kitchen door. She left the key sticking out of the lock the whole time she was inside, red yarn hanging down. Carrie said once that it looked like a flag somebody plants on a hill.
Then she made her rounds.
She opened the dishwasher and loaded it over again. She took the bath towels out of the hall closet and folded them in thirds, because Carrie folds in halves. She looked at the date on the milk. She lifted the lid on the hamper. She ran a dish towel along the baseboard behind the kitchen table and looked at the dish towel.
And she left notes. She kept a stack of index cards in her purse and she would write on one in pencil and prop it against the sugar bowl.
Baseboards.
Lucy’s fingernails.
That casserole dish is not clean, it is soaked.
She never raised her voice in my house. Not once in four years. She did not have to. She would just say a thing in a pleasant tone while she wiped a counter that had already been wiped.
“I suppose they don’t teach it anymore,” she would say. Or, “Well, your mother worked, Carrie, I know she did her best.”
Carrie’s mother raised four kids and waited tables at a truck stop on the interstate for twenty-two years. Carrie would stand there in her scrubs with her coffee going cold and say, “Yes, Joann.”
The first month, Carrie asked me to get the key back.
We were in bed. She said it quietly so it would not sound like a fight. “It’s your mother, and it was your key to give. I think it has to come from you. Would you ask her for it?”
She was right, and I knew it. If Carrie had asked, my mother would have had a daughter-in-law who threw her out. If I asked, she would have a son who had grown up. One of those she could have lived with.
I said, “She lent us six thousand dollars.”
“We’re paying it back.”
“She means well. It’s an hour in the morning. It’s easier to just let her, Carrie.”
Carrie did not answer me. She turned over.
We paid the $6,000 back in two years, $250 a month. My mother wrote “paid in full” on a card and gave it to me at Sunday dinner. I told myself that settled something.
The key stayed on its red yarn. The mornings went on.
Here is the part I have had to look at squarely.
On weekdays I was gone before she got there. I clocked in at 5:30 and I could tell myself I did not really know what went on in my kitchen at six. I only heard about it at night, and a thing you hear about at night is easy to make small.
But I was home Saturdays and Sundays.