The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China

He walked straight across that fellowship hall, past the folding tables and the ham and the paper tablecloths, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and in front of Pastor Dale and Thelma Prowse and every person in Bellford who had ever bought an egg from our mother, he said, “I’m sorry, Deb. I’m going to go get it. Right now. All of it.”

I will tell you I did not cry until he said that. I had made it through the viewing and the casket and the hymn she picked out herself without crying, and it was my brother’s voice cracking on the word all that finally did it.

“Terry,” I said, “the funeral luncheon isn’t even half over.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m still going.”

He drove out to his own house and brought every box back inside an hour, before the pie was even cut, and Mark, who had slipped into the back of the fellowship hall sometime during Ardith’s speech, straight from the elevator with grain dust still on his boots, helped him carry the cabinet back up onto the porch and through the front door and set it against the wall where the sun had kept that lighter rectangle all morning, the two of them working together without a word between them that I could hear, which from those two men was its own kind of forgiveness.

I asked Terry later that night, after most everyone had gone home and it was just the two of us standing in Mama’s dining room with the cabinet back against the wall and the boxes of dishes still sitting on the floor waiting to be unwrapped, why he’d done it. Why that morning, of all mornings.

He sat down on one of Mama’s dining chairs and put his head in his hands for a minute before he answered.

“Kim and I are three months behind on the house payment,” he said. “Haven’t told anybody. I kept thinking, everybody always says Deb got the good china brain, Deb got the house, Deb got everything, and I didn’t want to walk away from burying Mama with nothing to show that I was her son too. I know how that sounds.”

“It sounds like you thought dishes were going to fix something dishes can’t fix,” I said, and he nodded, because he knew it too.

“There’s a name on one of these for you too,” I told him, because Ardith had quietly pulled me aside before we left the church and told me there was, and that Lorna had specifically said not to let him leave that luncheon thinking his mother had only thought of me.