The Hallway They Left My Mother In
Dinner went on the way Sunday dinner always goes on in our family once the worst of a thing has passed. Somebody brought up the Chiefs game. The baby threw a roll on the floor and everybody laughed harder than it deserved because laughing felt good after all that holding still. Addie asked if she could sit next to Grandma Arlene for pie, and when nobody objected, she climbed into the chair on Mama’s other side and spent the rest of dessert narrating, in complete and unbroken detail, the entire plot of a cartoon Mama had never seen and would probably never watch, and Mama listened to every word of it like it was the most important news of the year, because that is also my mother in one sentence.
I wish I could tell you the story ended there, at a table with pie and a cartoon recap and everybody’s chest a little lighter, and in a lot of ways it did. But I think the truest ending came three Sundays later, back at Rick and Dana’s house for their turn to host again, because Dana didn’t let it rest at one apology and one hard Sunday.
When I walked in that time, Mama’s chair was already pulled up to the table, her plate already set, a smaller knife and a steadier cup already laid out at her place without anybody having to ask. And Dana was the one sitting beside her, not me, cutting her ham into bites before anybody else had even sat down, the way she must have decided, on her own, without being told twice, that this was going to be her job from here on, the thing she would do every single Sunday for as long as it needed doing, as a kind of ongoing answer to the question she’d never fully be able to put down.
“I told Cheryl she could have Sundays off from this one,” Dana said when she caught me watching. “I’ve got it. I’m going to have it from now on.”
Mama patted her hand, the weak one working just well enough to manage that much. “She does,” Mama said to me, like she was reporting good weather. “She does a fine job of it.”
I don’t know every word of what passed between Rick and Dana in the three weeks between those two dinners, and it’s not really mine to tell if I did know it. But Dana told me a little of it herself, standing at her sink that second Sunday while I dried dishes next to her, which is a thing we have done together for eleven years without either one of us thinking much of it.
“Rick didn’t sleep that whole first night,” she said. “He just sat up in the kitchen. I thought he was angry at me still, and I let him sit there because I figured I had it coming. Around two in the morning he came and got in bed and he said, Dana, we have to do better than we’ve been doing, and I don’t mean just Sundays. He meant all of it. The doctor visits I’d been leaving to you and the agency. The way we’d let your mother’s care become something that happened around the edges of our lives instead of something we planned for.”