The Locks I Changed on My Mother
My mother’s hand went to the edge of the counter.
“You cried in the car on the way home from her place more Sundays than I can count. And I sat in the front room with the ball game on every one of those Mondays and never said a word to her. Not one. I told you it was easier to let her.”
He looked at me when he said that. I felt it go through me like a wrench slipping.
“You learned a house is how a woman gets graded,” he said to her. “My mother taught you that, in our kitchen, and I let her. I’ve been sorry about it for forty years and never said so. I’m saying so. The boy did this morning what I ought to have done in 1983. He’s right, Joann. Let him drink his coffee.”
Then he sat back down. In my chair, the one on the side, the company chair. He had left me his.
I sat. I drank some of the coffee because my father had poured it.
My mother stood at the counter a long time. I had braced for the short answers and the sighing. What I had not braced for was how small she looked.
She came to the table at last. She picked up the kitchen-door cylinder and turned her key in it. The bolt had nothing to throw anymore. The key just went around.
“That one always stuck in wet weather,” she said.
She set it down, and went into the bedroom, and shut the door without slamming it.
My dad and I finished the pot. We did not talk about it. He asked what I thought was wrong with his pickup, which had a miss in it on cold starts, and I went out and found a cracked plug wire. I had a spare in my truck.
When I left, he walked me to the door.
“It’ll be a while,” he said. “She’ll come around slower than you want.”
“I can wait.”
“Don’t give the key back when she does.”
“I won’t, Dad.”
He nodded. He put his hand on the back of my neck for a second, the way he did when I was a boy and had done something right at a ball game.
Monday morning I was under bus number nine with a grease gun when my phone buzzed in my shirt pocket. It was 6:11.
A message from Carrie.
Nobody came. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I drank a whole cup of coffee while it was still hot.
I read it lying on the creeper under that bus. I stayed under there a few minutes longer than the job needed.
My mother did not come Tuesday either, or any day that week. She did not call. At church on Sunday she sat two pews ahead of us instead of beside us and left during the last hymn. I heard from a woman at the bus barn that the story going around the ladies’ circle was that Carrie had made me change the locks. I went and found that woman at coffee hour and told her plainly that it had been my idea, that it was four years late, and that my wife had not asked me to do a thing except be decent to my mother about it. She told the rest of them for me. It is a small town. It took about a day.