The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China
I remember one particular Sunday, the year my youngest was in kindergarten, when Ardith knocked over her water glass reaching for the rolls and it went straight into Phyllis’s lap, and Phyllis didn’t even flinch, just kept right on talking about her tomatoes while Mama mopped it up with a dish towel and laughed so hard she had to sit back down. That is the kind of fifty years it was. Not a single dramatic moment in most of it. Just four women, a roast, and a Sunday that kept coming back around like it always would, until the year it didn’t.
They had more right to grieve that china than Terry did, and I think some low, mean part of me knew that when I picked up Mama’s old wall phone and started dialing, knew that calling them wasn’t just comfort, it was aim, though I would not have admitted that to a single living soul that morning.
Ardith answered on the second ring, because Ardith is eighty three and doesn’t sleep past five anymore.
“He took the cabinet,” I told her. “This morning. Before the service. He took all of it, Ardith. Every plate.”
There was a silence on the line long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
“Does Phyllis know yet,” Ardith finally said, which was not the question I expected, and not an answer at all, but it told me something, because Ardith Fenwick does not waste a question on something that doesn’t matter.
“I haven’t called her.”
“Call her. Call Jean too. We’ll be at the church.”
That was all she said. She didn’t ask me if I was all right, which somehow was the kindest thing anybody did for me that whole morning, because it meant she already knew the answer and didn’t need me to perform it for her.
I want to tell you about my mother for a minute, because this isn’t really a story about a truck and some dishes, it’s a story about her, and I’d be doing her wrong if I let the fight over her things crowd out who she actually was.
Lorna Drummond ran the egg route for half of Reno County for thirty years. She drove a station wagon with a cracked dash and a cardboard box of change on the passenger seat and sold eggs out of the back to people who knew her by name before they knew the name of their own mail carrier. She was the kind of woman who kept a jar of peppermints in her apron pocket for other people’s children and kept her own children’s report cards in a cedar box she never once mentioned out loud, so that I only found out, going through that box after she died, that she had kept every single one of mine and Terry’s from kindergarten through senior year, both of ours, mixed together in the same stack, no favorites, which is a thing I wish Terry could have seen with his own eyes before that morning in the yard, because it might have put a different shape on everything that happened later.