The Funeral Money My Brother Moved
“Well,” Ruth said, and I heard her chair scrape back on her kitchen linoleum two counties away, “I’ll be there Saturday. Don’t you say one more word to him before then. Don’t you call that bank again either. Some things get fixed with paperwork, Peg, and some things only get fixed at a table, with the right person sitting at it.”
**
My husband Jeff drove me over to Mom’s on Saturday, through roads the county plow had only half cleared, and he didn’t say much on the way, which is Jeff’s way of being steady rather than his way of not caring. Jeff had grown up on a farm himself outside of Arlington and he does not believe in getting loud about things either, but he also does not believe in standing by while somebody gets taken advantage of, so when I told him what Dennis had done he had gone very quiet for about a day and then said, I’ll drive you wherever this needs to go, Peg, and I’ll stand in whatever doorway needs standing in, and that was the whole of it from him. He is not a man of many words, but on the Saturday Ruth came, when Dennis’s truck pulled up outside and his jaw was already set, it was Jeff who met him at the porch steps and said, quiet and plain, we’re just going to talk, Dennis, nobody’s here to jump you, and Dennis’s shoulders came down an inch at that, because he trusts Jeff the way you trust a man who has never once raised his voice at you.
We had arranged, through the activities director at Prairie Crossing, a woman named Kim who has a soft spot for our mother because Mom taught her own grandmother’s Sunday school class forty years ago, to bring Mom over to the house for a few hours that Saturday afternoon, since she was having what the staff there call a good window, a stretch of hours where her mind comes back almost all the way, clear enough that she asks after the lilac bush and remembers which drawer the good tablecloth is in. Those windows had been getting rarer. Kim told me on the phone that we should treat every one of them like it might be the last for a while, which is its own kind of grief, planning around the hours your own mother is still fully herself.
Mom came in wrapped in her good coat, color high in her cheeks from the cold, and the first thing she did, before she even sat down, was walk straight to the window over the sink and look out at the lilac bush bare and black against the snow and say, it never did take to this yard, did it, and I said no, Mom, it never did, and for just a second, standing there with her, none of the rest of it mattered. That’s the part I want people to understand about a mind that is leaving in pieces. The pieces that stay are so precious you could cry over them standing in your own kitchen, which I did, quietly, with my back half turned so she wouldn’t see.