The Hymn For Someone Else

“Slower,” Gran said from the bed, on the third day, without opening her eyes. She had been listening with the door open. “Slower, honey. Joyce took it slow.”

I stopped. “Who is Joyce?”

“Somebody I knew.”

“Gran.”

“Play it first,” she said, and I played it again, slower.

I asked Aunt Bev about it in the driveway. Bev is sixty-five, and she drives a Pontiac older than my marriage, and she has never in her life kept a thought to herself except, it turned out, this one.

“Joyce?” she said. “I don’t know any Joyce. Mama had a hundred friends from the church kitchen and not one of them was named Joyce.” She frowned at the fence line. “Voigt, maybe. There were Voigts on 212, east, before the Dunlaps bought them out. That’s all I know. That was before my time.”

The Voigts. I wrote it on the back of an envelope and put the envelope in my purse, and I did not ask Gran, because I had been told.

By the second week she was sleeping most of the day and half of the night. Valerie came Tuesdays and Fridays. She checked the pump and the pills and counted breaths, and one day she took me aside in the hallway and said gently, “It won’t be much longer. You might want to think about when.”

“She said she’d tell me when.”

“Then I’d listen for it,” Valerie said. “They usually know.”

I want to say something about my family, because it matters to the rest of this.

We are not a family that says things. We are a family that brings a casserole. My grandfather Dewitt ran the farm for fifty-three years and in all that time I do not think I ever heard him say he loved anyone. He showed it by mending your fence. When I was nineteen and my first marriage ended, my grandmother did not say a word about it. She mailed me a check for four hundred dollars with a note that said, “For the rent.” That was the whole letter.

So when my mother, my aunt and my uncle stood around that bed like three people at a bus stop, afraid of the weather, I am not criticizing them. I am describing us. Nobody in that room was good at the thing that was coming.

Thursday night Gran asked for water and drank four sips. Then she turned her head on the pillow toward me, where I was sitting with the lamp.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “After dinner. Call Bev and Herb. Tell Lorene to stand where I can see her.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, Rochelle. Tomorrow’s good.”

I called them. I did not have to explain. Herb drove over from Ashland. Bev came in from town with a Bundt cake nobody was going to eat. Travis had been home for the week and drove in that night. My cousin Vic, Herb’s boy, brought his two little girls, and my mother met them in the kitchen and said, “Mind you’re quiet, now. Great-Gran’s resting,” and the oldest one, who was seven, said, “Is she going to die?” and Mother said, “Not today, sweetheart,” because she could not say anything else. Vic took the girls out to the porch with a deck of cards, and that was the last I saw of them until it was over.