The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China

“Deb, you’ve got the kids. You’ve got that whole house full already, with the bunk beds and the toys and Mark’s tools in every corner. You don’t have room for a china cabinet. I’ve got the dining room for it. Kim’s already measured the wall.”

“Kim measured the wall,” I said.

“Yesterday.”

So this had been planned. Not a grief-fogged, can’t-think-straight decision made at six in the morning with his mother laid out at the funeral home twelve miles away. Measured. Planned with blankets and straps and a pickup truck backed up at dawn before the family could gather and the sun could come all the way up on what he was doing.

I want to tell you I was the kind of woman who ran down those porch steps in her stocking feet and put her hand flat on that cabinet and said over my dead body, which would have been a strange thing to say about anything belonging to a woman who herself was dead not twelve hours past viewing, but it would have been true to how I felt.

I did not do that.

I stood on the porch in my funeral shoes and I watched my younger brother and a borrowed hand truck load eighty years of our mother’s dishes into the bed of a Ford pickup, and I let him do it.

I need you to understand why, because if you don’t understand why, nothing else in this is going to make sense, and you are going to spend the whole time thinking I’m a coward, and I promise you I turned that word over in my own mouth enough times that morning that I don’t need you to hand it to me too.

Here is why.

In four hours my mother, Lorna Drummond, eighty one years old, was going to be carried into the front door of First Christian Church in a casket that her son and her son in law and two men from the volunteer fire department were going to help carry, and every single person in Bellford, Kansas, who had ever eaten a piece of her pie was going to be sitting in a pew watching us do it. If I had gone down into that yard and grabbed my brother by his funeral shirt and screamed at him over a dining set, every one of those people would have heard about it by the time the organ started. Mama would have been buried under the sound of her own children fighting in the yard over her dishes instead of under “In the Garden,” which was the hymn she had picked out herself, in writing, folded into her Bible, two years before she had any idea she’d need it this soon.