The Mother in the Back Row
“This is my mom. Most of you know her. Some of you maybe didn’t know who she was today, and that’s my doing. I asked her to wear this color so she wouldn’t show up in the pictures. I asked her to stand in the back row. She didn’t argue. She went and bought the dress and she stood where I told her, all day, and she never said a word to me about it.”
“Lauren,” I said.
“Let me finish, Mom.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “My mom raised me by herself from the time I was six. She checked groceries all day, and at night she cleaned the bank and the co-op office and the dentist’s. She couldn’t pay a sitter at night, so I went along. I did my spelling words at the loan officer’s desk. And then I’d fall asleep on the green couch in the bank lobby, and every single morning I woke up in my own bed and I never once wondered how I got there.”
She turned and looked at me.
“She carried me. Every night, after eight hours on her feet and four more with a mop. She carried me out to the car and then she carried me in the house. For years. Until I was too big, and I bet she did it a while after that.”
I did. She was nine and all legs. I never told her.
“And she paid for this,” Lauren said, to the room. “The barn, and your supper, and this dress I’ve got on. Nineteen thousand dollars, thirty-five dollars a week, since I was a junior in high school. And I put her in the back, by a hay bale, because I was scared.” Her chin came up. “That’s the truth. I was scared that if today wasn’t easy, somebody might not come. That isn’t my mom’s fault and I let her pay for it anyway. So I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry in front of all of them, because that’s where I did it.”
I could not see very well by then. I got hold of her and she got hold of me, and I felt her shaking, a married woman, a nurse, shaking like she did when she had the croup.
“All right,” I said into her hair. “All right now. That’s enough. I’m not hurt.”
“You are so.”
“Well. Not anymore.”
Somebody out in the gravel started to clap, and Jeff’s big voice said, “Let them be a minute,” and it stopped.
It was Sandra who moved first.
She had been standing just inside the door with her hand on Rick’s sleeve. She let go of it and walked over to the cooler where the florist’s box still sat, and she bent down, and she came back with a little plastic shell in her hand. The sticker on it said Mom.
“This was in the box since one o’clock,” she said. “I saw it when they pinned mine. I’ve been sick about it all day and I didn’t know how to bring it to you without making it worse.”
She opened the shell. Her hands were not quite steady.
“I want you to know I never asked for any of it, Jill. Not the dress, not where you stood. I didn’t know until I got out of the car this afternoon and saw you. I’d have worn a feed sack before I let that happen on my account.”