The Widow Across the Gravel Road

The notice

I did not move the boys right away. I could have. Maybe I should have.

But my mother had been counting on that money in some way I did not understand yet, and I had been raised to give notice. So on the first Friday in May, when I paid her the $180, I told her.

“After June,” I said. “I’m going to have the boys stay with Arlene Voss on my work nights. I wanted you to have time to plan.”

Mom looked at me like I had said I was moving to Texas. “Arlene Voss? She’s seventy-two years old.”

“She’s up at four every morning. She raised four kids on that farm.”

“She’ll let them run wild.”

“She taught Owen to play rummy. He’s counting to a hundred and twenty now.”

Mom wrote Pd. on the yellow sheet and tore it off and handed it to me without looking up. “Well. You’ll be back,” she said.

I did not answer that. I put the sheet in my purse. That night it went in the recipe box behind the rhubarb bars, with the others.

The last Friday in June

I paid her every Friday in May. I paid her every Friday in June. The last one was June twenty-sixth. I gave her the $180 in cash, the same as the first one, and she wrote Pd. on it and dated it.

Twenty-six pages. $4,680.

I did not say anything about it being the last one. I hugged her at the door like I always did. She held on a second longer than usual, and then she let go.

The first night at Arlene’s

The next Tuesday at a quarter after six I walked the boys across the gravel road with their pillows under their arms and Sam’s stuffed dog dragging by one ear.

Arlene was standing on her porch. She had on a cardigan, even though it was June, because she was always cold. She had made up Harold’s room with a quilt on the bed and two flashlights on the dresser.

“Flashlights are for the bathroom only,” she told them. “Not for tag. We’ll have tag in daylight.”

I went to work. It was a hard night. We lost a gentleman I had been caring for since Sunday, and I sat with his daughter in the family room until almost five. I drove home in the gray light with the window down to keep awake.

When I pulled into our lane, I looked across the road. Arlene’s kitchen light was on, and the barn door was open, and there was Sam in his pajamas and his tennis shoes, sitting on an upside-down bucket with a coffee can of cat food in his lap, and seven cats in a half circle around him like he was the preacher.

I put my head down on the steering wheel and I cried, finally, the way I had not let myself cry since January.

Then I wiped my face, walked across, and brought my boys home, one small hand in each of mine, while Arlene stood on her porch in her cardigan and waved us down the lane.