A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

What I Knew, Standing There

My mother was Doreen Chandler, but everybody in Cedar Falls Junction, Iowa, a town of about 2,300 in the south of the state, called her Dee. She died on a Tuesday morning at seventy-one, at home, in her own bed, with hospice in the kitchen and me beside her. It was pancreatic cancer and it took six weeks from the day they told her.

My father is Lewis Chandler. Everyone calls him Lew. He and my mother were married in 1974 and divorced in 1998, when I was twenty-one. I will not dress it up. My father drank. He was not a mean drunk, just an absent one, and in the spring of 1998 my mother told him to choose, and he chose the bottle, and she packed his things into the bed of his own truck.

Here is the part that is hard to explain to people who have not lived in a small town. He quit the next January. He never took another drink. And every winter since, at about five in the morning, my father walked over to Cedar Street and shoveled my mother’s walk and her driveway, before she woke up. He checked her furnace every October. He kept the spare key to her back door on a nail by his own back door, in case of emergencies, because I live seventy miles away in Ottumwa and my brother Mervin lives in Tucson.

She let him. She never said thank you out loud, and he never asked. That was how they forgave each other.

He married Deana in 2003. She was a widow from Creston with a good laugh and a standing hair appointment, and I will be fair to her, because I am trying to be fair all through this. She was good to my father. She kept him fed and kept him sober and she kept his house cleaner than it had ever been. But for twenty-three winters she lay in bed beside him at five in the morning and listened to him get up and go shovel another woman’s walk. I did not think about that until much later.

The rest of what I knew came from Trudy, in the church kitchen, in about forty seconds. At six that morning, while I was asleep at a motel on the highway because I could not stand to sleep in the house with the hospital bed still in the front room, Deana had taken the spare key off the nail by my father’s back door. She had driven her station wagon to Cedar Street and loaded my mother’s rolling pin, her Pyrex, her cast iron skillet, her bread bowl, her colander, and everything off the kitchen windowsill. She had stuck a price sticker on every piece. By nine she had it all out on my father’s porch on Walnut Street, with her sister Colleen keeping a tally in a spiral notebook. Then she had dressed and gone to the funeral and sat in the second pew.

So here is why I did not scream.