The Hallway They Left My Mother In

Here is where I want to tell you something that Ruth, who has sat two pews behind me at Mount Olive Baptist for thirty years, would want told, because it matters as much as the hallway did. Dana did not get thrown out of that house or shamed for the rest of the afternoon. Nobody made her stand in a corner. What happened instead was smaller and, I think, harder for her, and better for all of us in the long run.

She came around the table, past her own husband, past me, and she knelt down next to Mama’s chair the way Rick had, and she took Mama’s trembling hand.

“Arlene, I am so sorry,” she said. “There is no excuse good enough and I’m not going to try to give you one. I was overwhelmed and I made the worst choice I’ve ever made and I understand if you don’t forgive me today. I just need you to know I see it now. I see what I did.”

My mother, who has more grace in her than anybody else I have ever personally known, looked at Dana for a long moment, and then she reached up with her weak hand, the one that doesn’t always do what she tells it, and she touched Dana’s cheek.

“You were drowning, child,” Mama said. “I’ve been there myself, a long time ago, with four kids and your father in law’s mother living with us and not enough hours in the day. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t hurt. It did. But I know the difference between a mean woman and a tired one, and you are not a mean woman, Dana.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Brenda, my husband’s sister who’d driven up from Springfield for the day, said from down the table. She’s not one to let a thing go soft before its time. “Sorry, Arlene, I know you’re being generous, but it wasn’t right, and somebody ought to say so plain so it’s not repeated.”

“It wasn’t right,” Mama agreed. “Both things can be true.”