The Locks I Changed on My Mother
Saturdays and Sundays I lay in my own bed and heard my mother’s car door, and her shoes on the driveway, and the key go into the lock. I heard the dishwasher open. I heard Carrie get up beside me, every time, and put on her robe, and go out there so that my mother would not be alone in the kitchen deciding things.
And I lay there. Sometimes I pulled the pillow over my ear.
I did the arithmetic later, on the back of a parts invoice. Four years of Saturdays and Sundays comes to 416 mornings. Take out the handful when we were out of town and call it four hundred.
Four hundred times I was right there, and four hundred times I picked a quiet morning over my wife.
I never thought of it as picking. That is how a man like me does it. I thought of it as keeping the peace. I had grown up in that house eleven blocks away. I knew what it cost to cross my mother: not shouting, never shouting, but three weeks of short answers and a sigh at every meal and my dad looking at his plate. I had learned by the age of ten that the cheap way through was to say “Yes, Mom” and go out to the garage.
So I handed that bill to Carrie instead, every morning at six, and told her it was easier.
It was easier. For me.
So. That Saturday.
I had been in the garage since half past five, getting the snowblower ready before the weather turned. Carrie was in the shower. Lucy was still asleep, or we thought so.
My mother came in at six with the key, same as ever. She found a basket of clean towels on the dryer, folded them in thirds, and carried them down the hall. The bedroom door was open. Carrie had left a stack of my T-shirts on top of the dresser, so my mother opened a drawer to put them away.
And saw balled socks.
By the time I came in for my rag, she had been at it ten minutes.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I told you what I am doing.” She set the empty drawer on the stack and picked up one of my undershirts off the bed. She laid it flat on the quilt and began to fold it, sleeves in, bottom up, quick as a card dealer. “It will take me forty minutes. You can go on back out.”
There was a shoebox on the bed too. I knew that box. Carrie kept it at the very back of her bottom drawer, under her winter things. My mother had taken the lid off.
“Did you open that?” I said.
“I didn’t know what it was. It was in with the sweaters.” She glanced at it. “It’s only cards and things. She ought to have a proper place for keepsakes.”
It was not only cards. It was the letters I wrote Carrie the winter I worked a pipeline job in North Dakota, before we were married. It was Lucy’s hospital bracelet. And it was a second hospital bracelet, a very small one, from the baby we lost at twenty weeks, two years before Lucy. We had never told my mother about that baby. Carrie had not been ready to hear what my mother would say.