The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China

And there was something else, something uglier and more practical that I am less proud of, which is that I did not know, standing there in my stocking feet, whether the law was on my side or his. Mama hadn’t left a will. She had always said she would get around to it, the way people say that about a lot of things they think they have more time for than they do, and so on the morning of her funeral, legally speaking, that china cabinet belonged to whichever one of her children could get it loaded into a truck first. I didn’t want to find that out by calling the sheriff’s department on my own brother on the day I buried my mother, and have it be true that there was nothing Deputy Holtz could do but stand in the yard with his hands on his belt and watch, which I believed, rightly, would have been exactly what happened. Sharon Deets down at the co op, who used to dispatch for the county, told me later I could have called it in as a civil matter and had it sorted by a judge in a few weeks, and she was probably right, and I have never once wished I had done that, because a judge was never going to give me back what I actually wanted, which was my mother’s dishes passed down the way she meant them to be passed down, by her own hand, not by a court order with my brother’s name blacked out of it.

So I let the truck pull out of the yard at twenty past six in the morning, gravel popping under the tires, the empty rectangle on the dining room wallpaper already lighter than the rest of the wall where the cabinet had stood for eighty years and kept the sun off, and I went inside and finished getting dressed for my mother’s funeral.

Mark wasn’t there to see any of it, and I want to say that plainly because somebody is going to wonder where my husband was while all this happened, and he wasn’t off somewhere avoiding it. Mark drives grain truck for the co op every fall, and the Tuesday of Mama’s funeral was the one day that month another driver called in sick and there was nobody else to run the last load off the Pearson place before the elevator cutoff, and Mark had told Terry and me both, two days before, I will be there for the service, I cannot miss the morning run, I’m sorry, call me the second anything happens. I did call him. He didn’t get the message until he pulled into the elevator scale house forty minutes later, grain dust on his collar, and he told me afterward that he sat in that truck cab and put both hands over his face for a full minute before he could make himself drive home and change clothes, because he said if he’d been twenty minutes later leaving the Pearson place that morning he’d have pulled into Mama’s yard just as Terry was pulling out of it, and he didn’t know what he would have done, and he was almost glad he hadn’t had the chance to find out. Mark loved my mother. She called him her good one, which used to make Terry’s jaw go tight at Thanksgiving. Mark not being in that yard wasn’t a small thing to him. It was just a thing he couldn’t help.