The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
“Why didn’t you?”
He thought about it. I will give him that. He did not hand me the first answer.
“Because it was working,” he said at last. “The note was getting paid and Mom wasn’t crying and nobody was mad at me. All it cost was you. And you never made me pay for it, so I let you keep paying.”
“I’m not doing Sundays like that anymore, Brian. Baby or no baby.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “You are not.”
He has kept that. I will say so plainly, since I have said the rest. He called Dale himself the next morning about the forty, so his father would not have to make that call alone. He took over the last three payments out of his own check, and we ate a lot of beans that fall. And he started getting up with me at five when I was sick, and sitting on the edge of the tub, and not saying anything, which was exactly right.
A man does not get remade in an afternoon. But he can turn around in one, and Brian did.
We did not go out to the farm for six Sundays.
I was not punishing anybody. I simply was not going to sit at that table again until the woman at the foot of it had something to say to me, and I was not going to go fetch it from her.
Gene came to town on Wednesdays and had coffee at our kitchen table. He told me Lorraine had not made rolls since that day. He told me she had gone to the desk on the Monday, by herself, and read every paper in it, front and back. Then she had put her coat on and walked across the road to Dale’s and told him he could have her daddy’s forty, and what she wanted for it, and not to try to talk her down.
“She did that herself?” I said.
“I did not know she was gone till I saw her coming back up the lane.” He shook his head. “Forty-nine years and I thought she could not stand to know. Turns out she could not stand not knowing.”
It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving when her car pulled up in front of our house.
I saw her from the window. She sat behind the wheel for a full five minutes with the engine off. Then she got out, in her good coat, carrying something wrapped in a towel.
I opened the door before she could knock. She stood on my porch in the cold. She looked smaller in town.
“I have been to the altar over this,” she said. “Three Sundays. I thought if I got right with the Lord that would be the hard part. It was not the hard part. This is.”
I waited.
“I struck you. In my own dining room, at the Lord’s day dinner, with your husband and his father looking on. My mother never raised a hand to a soul in her life, and I did it in front of her bread basket.” Her chin was going. She held it still by main force. “I have no excuse and I am not going to stand here and make one. I was scared, and I was proud, and I picked the one person at that table who could not hit back.”