The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door
I could not answer right off. Not because of the stroke.
“Come see the porch,” I said.
The back porch is the best room in the house and it is not a room. It is eight feet by twelve, with a roof over it and three steps down to the yard. Don screened it in 1990. You can see the whole garden from there, and Harriet’s clothesline, and the top of the water tower.
The garden was mostly done for the year. There were still some tomatoes hanging on, and the last of the zinnias, gone tall and ragged.
“I planted those in May,” I said. “Harriet kept them watered. I was in the hospital in August, when the tomatoes should have been picked.”
“What happened in August?” Josh asked. “If you don’t mind.”
So I told them. It took a while.
The fourth of August, a Tuesday. I got up at my usual time and came out to the kitchen to start the coffee, and the floor came up at me. That is how it felt. I did not fall so much as the floor rose.
I lay on the linoleum beside the stove from about half past seven until half past eleven.
Harriet noticed at eleven that my Daily Sun was still lying on the front walk. I have brought that paper in before seven every morning she has known me. She came across the alley, looked through the back door glass, and saw my feet.
She broke the pane with a garden trowel.
“Four hours,” Abby said.
“Four hours.”
“And your daughter?”
“She was at work. In Lincoln. Harriet called her from the ambulance.”
I had not thought much about that telephone call until I said it out loud on the porch. I had been on the floor. I had my own troubles that day. I had never once pictured the other end of it: my girl at her desk, picking up the receiver, and a neighbor’s voice saying your mother has been on the kitchen floor since breakfast and I do not know if she will live.
And then forty miles of Highway 77 with that in the car with her.
I was standing there holding the porch rail, thinking about that for the first time, when I heard a car door slam out front.
I know the sound of every car door that has ever belonged to my children.
“That’s Kim,” I said.
Ms. Dunning had come out onto the porch behind us. She straightened up like a girl caught in the hall.
We heard the front door. We heard heels on the living room floor, fast, and then Kim came through the kitchen with her coat open and her purse sliding off her shoulder, and stopped in the porch door.
She is forty-two. She has Don’s coloring and my chin. She looked at me, at the cane, at two strangers in jackets, at the realtor. She had been crying in the car. A mother can tell.
“Mom,” she said. “Mom, you weren’t supposed to be home until Friday. I was going to tell you. I swear to you I was going to tell you this weekend, I had it all…”
“Kim.”
“…planned out, I was going to bring the brochure and we were going to sit down…”
“Kim.”
She stopped.
Josh had the flyer in his hand still. He looked down at it, at the picture of my porch and my mums and that number. He folded it in half. He folded it in half again, and put it in his jacket pocket.