The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

Ron is her husband. He had a stroke in April. He is home, and he is better than he was, but he cannot be left for long, and he gets up in the night confused, and Cheryl has been doing all of it herself, plus her job at the county clerk’s office, plus the committee. She had been awake since three that morning with him. She had not told me. She had not told anyone. That is a family trait, and I know exactly who we get it from.

Then, she said, the pastor asked her one more thing.

“He asked me what I wanted to do about it,” she told me. “Not what I ought to do. What I wanted to do. And I said I wanted to go home and never show my face again. And he said, ‘I understand that. What’s the second thing you want to do?'”

She came out of the kitchen by herself.

The supper was still going. People were on their pie by then. Nobody had left. When she came through that door the talk died down again, table by table, not all at once like before, but enough.

She did not go to the piano microphone. She did not make an announcement.

She walked down the middle of that hall, past every table, in front of every person who had seen what she did, all the way to the end by the door where our mother was sitting with Mr. Abbott.

She stopped in front of Mom’s chair.

And then Cheryl, who is fifty-eight, who has a bad hip, who irons her blouses for committee meetings, got down on both knees on that speckled linoleum. Not at the spot by the serving table. Here, at Mom’s feet, which was worse, because it was further and everyone had watched her come.

She took our mother’s hands in hers. The hands that had been held out empty.

“Mama,” she said.

She has not called her that since she was ten years old.

“I knocked your plate down. I spoke to you like you were nothing. I did it in front of everybody, so I am going to say this in front of everybody.” Her voice shook, but it carried. “I’m sorry. I was wrong. There isn’t any excuse for it and I am not going to give you one.”

Mom started to speak. Cheryl shook her head.

“That’s not all of it. I have let them thank me for your chicken for eleven years. I sat in that pew and I nodded. Every year I told myself I’d fix it next year.” She was crying openly now. “I was ashamed of your dress, Mama. I was ashamed you were slow. And you were up at four in the morning doing my job for me, and I was ashamed of you.”

Nobody in that hall moved.

“I don’t know how you forgive that,” Cheryl said. “But I’m asking.”

My mother looked down at her for what felt like a full minute.

Then she took one hand out of Cheryl’s and laid it on top of her daughter’s head. Flat, the whole palm, the way she used to check us for fever.

“You always were my tired one,” she said.

Cheryl made a sound I had not heard from her since we were children.

“You came out tired,” Mom said. “You never would nap. You’d fight it and fight it till you just fell over, and then you’d wake up mean and be sorry after.” She smoothed Cheryl’s hair back off her forehead. “I know my girls. I’ve known you fifty-eight years. You think I don’t know what you look like when you’re give out?”