The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
“I want to go to church Sunday,” she said.
“You go to church every Sunday, Mamaw.”
“I want you to drive me. And I don’t want to call ahead and tell Carol I’m coming, because she already knows I go every Sunday, same as she does, and she can’t very well stop going to her own church on account of me.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’m going to ask her my question in the fellowship hall, after, in front of whoever’s standing there drinking coffee. Not to shame her. I want to be clear about that, Robin. I’m not doing this to shame my own daughter in front of Pastor Dale and the Hendersons and everybody else. I’m doing it because she has had five Sundays to bring that can back to me private, and she hasn’t, and I believe she needs the whole room to help her find her nerve, because she sure hasn’t found it on her own.”
I thought about that sentence for a long time afterward. My grandmother was not planning an ambush. She was planning something closer to a rescue, for a daughter who seemed to be drowning in whatever shame or trouble had made her do this in the first place, and who could not, on her own, swim back to the surface and say so.
Sunday came up clear and cool, the kind of early fall morning in our part of Tennessee where the fog sits low in the hollows until about eight thirty and then burns off all at once, and you can smell somebody’s wood stove even though it isn’t cold enough yet to need one. I picked Mabel up at quarter to nine. She was waiting on the porch in her good navy dress, the one with the small white buttons, her purse already on her lap, her white hair set the way she still sets it herself every Saturday night with pink foam rollers, because she has never in her life let anybody else do her hair and does not plan to start now.
She got in the car slow, the way she does everything now, careful of her hip, and settled that purse square in her lap with both hands on top of it, and looked straight ahead out the windshield instead of at me.
“You ready, Mamaw?”
“I’ve been ready since Tuesday.”
We drove the eleven miles into town without the radio on. Mabel looked out the window the whole way, at the Hendersons’ cattle standing in the low field, at the roadside stand that sells tomatoes until the first frost, at all the things she has looked at out of one car window or another for almost seventy years, and I kept glancing over at her instead of watching the road the way I should have, because I could not get over how calm she looked. Not cold. Calm, the way the air gets calm right before a front moves through, when everything is still and you can feel the pressure dropping anyway.