The Hallway They Left My Mother In
I rolled Mama’s chair right up to the head of the table, into the space where her plate should have been the whole time, and I set the brake, and I said, “Somebody hand me her plate.”
Nobody moved for a second. Then my granddaughter Addie, who is eight and has never in her life waited for permission to say what’s on her mind, looked straight at Dana and said, “Why was Grandma Arlene in the hallway?”
Dana’s hands stopped moving over the green beans. “She just needed a quiet minute, honey.”
“But she doesn’t like being by herself,” Addie said. “She told me so. She said it’s the thing she likes least about her house, being by herself too much.”
You could have heard a fork drop in that room. My grandson Jacob, who’s eleven and usually has his head in his phone through every family dinner we’ve ever had, put his phone face down on the table without anybody telling him to, and said, “That’s kind of messed up, Aunt Dana. No offense.”
“Jacob,” his mother said, a warning in it.
“I’m not trying to be rude,” Jacob said. “I’m just saying. You wouldn’t leave one of us out there.”
And that was the moment, if I’m honest, that did more work than anything I said or did. Not because an eleven year old’s opinion carries some special moral weight, but because it meant the wrongness of it wasn’t just me being oversensitive, wasn’t me and Mama against the world the way Dana would maybe have liked to believe in that moment, to make it smaller than it was. A child who had no horse in this race looked at what happened and called it what it was in about one second flat.
I got Mama’s plate moved over, found her a butter knife, and started cutting her ham into pieces she could manage while the table sat there watching me do it, which I didn’t love, but somebody needed to and I was the one with the practice.
“You didn’t have to make a whole thing of it, Cheryl,” Dana finally said, still at the stove, her back half turned. “I had it handled.”
“She was alone in a dark hallway, Dana.”
“The light from the kitchen reaches in there.”
“It does not reach far enough for her to see her own fork.”
“I was going to go back and check on her in a few minutes, once things settled down some.”
“She’d finished half her plate cold and alone by the time I found her.”