A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring
I had spent six weeks watching my mother die and I thought I knew everything she had been. I did not know about the Wednesdays. I found out on a sidewalk, on the worst afternoon of my life, from a man in a John Deere cap, and it made me love her more and miss her harder in the same breath.
A girl on a bicycle had fallen in behind us somewhere around the second house. Her name was Abby Fisk and she lived two doors down from my father. She was ten, with a gap in her front teeth and a bike with a bell shaped like a ladybug, and I had known her since she was in a stroller. She had heard every word.
“Mrs. Rowe?” She put one sneaker on the curb. “I saw her too. She drove off in a blue Buick. It had a feed co-op sticker on the back window.”
“Thank you, Abby. That helps.”
“I can go look for it,” she said. “I’m fast.”
“Stay where your mother can see you.”
She rolled her eyes at me, ten years old, exactly the way I had at ten, and she pedaled off ahead of us anyway, as far as the corner, where she stopped and waited with one foot down.
The Wrong Way Around
Mike drove, and the rest of us walked at first and then piled into the truck and the Hendrys’ sedan, and we reached the Legion hall at twenty minutes to three. It is a low brick building with a flagpole out front and a hand-lettered bake sale sign taped to the door. Inside, the Auxiliary ladies in their blue vests sat behind tables of pies, pickle jars, zucchini bread, and quilted potholders.
Bessie Langley was at the cash box. I held up the photograph.
“Oh, honey,” she said, and came around the table. “She was here. Not twenty minutes ago. She sat right there at the card table sorting buttons out of a coffee can, and then she went real quiet. She turned something over in her hand and read the inside of it. I told her whose it was, because I knew, because I was at the Chandler wedding. And I said, ‘Oh no, Dee’s funeral was this morning.'” She pressed her lips together. “She went white as flour. She said she had to get it to the family and she left. She asked me where the Methodist church was.”
“That’s where we just came from,” I said.
“Then you passed her on the road, honey, or she lost her nerve.”
We went back to the church. The parking lot was nearly empty. The ladies from the funeral lunch were wrapping leftovers in foil. Nobody had seen a blue Buick, and nobody had seen a small woman with a cane. I stood in the middle of the lot with the photograph in my hand like a fool.
Rummage Day brings a few hundred strangers into a town of 2,300, and every one of them is carrying a bag. We tried the Lutheran church basement, where the youth group had a sale. We tried the VFW, where a man thought he had seen a tan sweater at one-thirty, before any of this had happened. Abby circled the courthouse square on her bicycle twice and came back shaking her head. Trudy knocked on every door of a block I will not name, because every one of those people was kind to me, and not one of them had seen her.