Thirty One Days in the Church Basement
Day 31
We were packing on the morning of day thirty-one. It does not take long to pack when everything you own came out of donation bags.
Brody was carrying boxes up the stairs to Travis’s pickup. Travis had come home the night before to help us move. Kenzie was folding quilts. Cole was playing one last game of checkers with Harold, who had come by at nine in the morning to check the furnace.
Ann and Doris were in the kitchen wrapping the last of the casserole dishes to give back. Pastor Dan was on a ladder taking down the cots one at a time and handing them to the Methodist men.
Lily was sitting on her cot, the one with Ruby Coffman’s quilt, in her purple hat. She was refusing to let anybody fold it.
That is when I heard somebody coming down the basement stairs.
Slow steps. Heavy ones. Like someone carrying something awkward.
I looked up, and it was Jessica.
She was carrying something wrapped in a black trash bag, long and round, nearly as tall as Lily. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the coat hooks and the four red stockings. I watched her read the names.
The whole basement went quiet. Harold put down his checker. The ladies in the kitchen stopped wrapping.
My sister did not look at me. She walked straight across that basement floor to Lily’s cot, and she knelt down, and she pulled the trash bag off.
It was a roll of carpet. Pale and soft, the color of the inside of a shell. Oyster.
“I had some left over,” Jessica said. Her voice was shaking. “From the guest room. The installer left it.”
She unrolled it on the basement floor in front of Lily’s cot. It was maybe six feet by eight. Then she reached in her coat pocket and took out a brand new box of washable markers, the big kind, sixty-four colors.
“Lily,” she said. “Would you color me a picture on this?”
Lily looked at me.
I did not know what to say. I nodded.
Lily slid off the cot in her socks, sat down right in the middle of eleven thousand dollars’ worth of carpet, and picked out a purple marker. She drew a big lopsided circle and started on what I think was supposed to be a dog.
Jessica watched her for a long time. Then she stood up and turned around and looked at the room. At Harold. At Ann and Doris in the kitchen doorway. At Pastor Dan on his ladder. At Travis and Brody on the stairs. At Kenzie, holding a folded quilt against her chest.
What Jessica Said
“On the night of the fire,” Jessica said, “my sister called me and asked if her kids could stay with me. And I told her no. I told her they would ruin my new carpet.”
Nobody moved.
“I said that,” Jessica said. “Out loud. To my baby sister. While her house was burning. And she said thank you, and she hung up, and she never told one person what I said. I know she didn’t, because if she had, somebody would have said it to my face by now. Nobody has. You all just moved pews.”
Her face crumpled up, and she pressed her hand over her mouth for a second.
“I want you to know why,” she said. “Not so you’ll forgive me. Just so you’ll know.”
She looked at me then for the first time.
“We grew up on plywood,” she said. “Heather knows. Brown paint, wore off where you walked. I was ashamed of that floor my whole life. I stopped bringing girls home in fourth grade because of that floor. I worked thirty years to put something soft under my feet.”
“Jess,” I said.
“And when you called,” she said, “I panicked. I didn’t think about the kids. I thought about that floor. I thought, it’s going to be ruined, and I’m going to be right back where I started. That’s the truth. I said the worst sentence I’ve ever said in my life because I was scared of a floor.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“It’s carpet,” she said. “It’s just carpet. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever loved.”
She turned to Kenzie.
“Kenzie, honey,” she said. “I know you heard me. I’m so sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was never about you. It was about me being small. I’m not going to be small anymore.”
Kenzie did not say anything. She held onto that quilt.