The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

Charlene was his second wife. They married when I was twenty six, long grown and gone, and whatever complicated thing existed between her and my sister Patty over the years, Charlene had been good to my father in the ways that counted when it mattered most. She drove him to Springfield for chemo eleven times. She learned to give him his shots. She sat up with him the last three nights of his life in a recliner she dragged into the bedroom so she would not have to leave him alone in the dark, and when he died at four in the morning on a Tuesday, she was the one holding his hand, not me, because I was three hours away in Columbia and did not make it in time, which is its own kind of grief I have not fully set down yet and maybe never will.

So when I tell you what she did, I want you to understand I am not telling you about a villain in a story. I am telling you about a tired, grieving sixty four year old woman who could not stand to look at an empty building anymore, and who made the worst decision of her life in the forty eight hours after burying the only man who ever made her feel like she had a permanent place at a table, and who did it without asking the one person who had the most right to be asked.

We got to Larkin a little after eight that night. The house sat dark except for the porch light, and past it, past the gravel turnaround, the pole barn sat dark too, its roll door shut, and I did not go out there that night. I told myself it was because it was dark and there was nothing to see. The truth is I was not ready. I had just driven five hours knowing what I would find and some part of me wanted one more night where I had not yet stood inside it.

Charlene met us at the door in her housecoat, her eyes red rimmed, and she hugged me before I could decide whether I wanted to be hugged, and she smelled like the dish soap she always used and like my father’s house, and I hugged her back because whatever she had done two days before did not undo thirty eight years of every other thing, and because my father was lying in a funeral home four blocks away and I did not have room that night for two griefs at once.

“I’m sorry, Russ,” she said into my shoulder. “I should have waited.”

“We’ll talk about it Thursday,” I said. “Not tonight.”