The Widow Across the Gravel Road

Rummy

We stayed until the power came back on, almost four hours. Arlene got a deck of cards out of the drawer under her telephone, a real telephone on the wall with a cord, and she taught Owen to play rummy.

She did not let him win. That was the first thing I noticed. She made him count his points out loud, and when he laid down a run that was not a run, she said, “Try that again, mister,” and he did.

Sam fell asleep on her davenport under an afghan that smelled like cedar. Arlene looked at him for a long time.

“It’s so quiet here since Harold,” she said. “I didn’t know a house could be that loud with nobody in it.”

I did not know what to say. I just nodded.

“I’m up at four every morning anyhow,” she went on. “I never could sleep past four. Fifty years of milking cows does that, and then the cows were gone and I still couldn’t.”

The offer

I did not ask her. I want to be clear about that. I would never have asked a seventy-two-year-old widow to keep my boys two nights a week.

It came up in April. I had stopped to get her mail when it was raining and she was not feeling well, and she asked me how my mother was, because she knew Donna from the Altar Society years back, before Mom switched churches.

I said Mom was fine. Then, because I was tired and it was raining and Arlene had a way of looking at you over her glasses that made you tell the truth, I told her about the notepad.

She did not say anything bad about my mother. She did not say anything at all for a while. She just folded her hands on the oilcloth.

“Bring them here,” she said.

“Arlene, I couldn’t.”

“You could. Tuesday and Wednesday. I have Harold’s room made up and nobody in it. I’m up at four. They can feed the cats before you get home.”

“I’d pay you.”

“You will not.” She said it the way my grandmother used to say things, in a voice there was no getting around. “Bring me a pie when you can. Rhubarb, if you have it. Harold’s patch went to nothing after he died.”