The Widow Across the Gravel Road

The phone call

Mom called on a Wednesday in late July. I was getting ready for work.

“Arlene Voss called me,” she said.

I stopped with one arm in my scrub top. “She did?”

“She asked me to come out Friday afternoon. For coffee. At her place.” Mom’s voice was strange, careful. “Jenna, did you ask her to do that?”

“No, Mom. I didn’t know.”

“Well.” A long pause. “I guess I’ll go, then.”

Arlene’s kitchen table

I was there because Arlene asked me to be. The boys were in the barn with the cats, where we could hear them through the screen door, Sam telling Gus the one-eared cat a long story about a tractor.

Arlene had set the table with her good cups, the ones with the little blue flowers. She had made a coffee cake. My mother came in carrying a pie she had bought at the bakery in town, and set it on the counter, and sat down like she was in the principal’s office.

For a while the two of them talked about the Altar Society. Who had passed. Who had moved to Waterloo to live with a daughter. Whether the new priest was any good.

Then Arlene set her cup down.

“Donna,” she said. “I have had your grandsons in my house eight nights now. They are good boys. You raised a good daughter, and she is raising good boys.”

“Thank you,” Mom said, very quietly.

“I’m not going to ask you anything,” Arlene said. “I’m going to tell you something, and then you can say whatever you want or nothing at all.”

“When Harold died, I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t answer the door for three weeks. I sat in that chair and I counted every dollar we had, over and over, like if I counted it enough times it would turn into more.”

Mom looked up.

“I know what being scared looks like,” Arlene said. “That’s all.”