The Neighbors Who Filled My Kitchen Table

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

After that, Thursdays changed. Tricia started coming out every Thursday at ten, letting herself in with the key I had given her years ago in case of a fall. “Just checking on you.” She counted my pills. She looked in my refrigerator and said “Hm.” She picked up my mail, which I keep in a recipe box on the counter and sort on Fridays, and said, “Irene, this is two weeks of mail.”

“It’s a system.”

“It’s a pile.”

In October she took a photograph of my stove with her telephone. There was a big kettle of apple butter on a back burner, the kind you stir now and then for three hours. Evelyn Ingram and I were making it. I was at the sink fifteen feet away, coring the next batch. But all Tricia had was the picture, and a woman with a picture can build a great deal.

Then, the Monday before the man called, Opal came across the yard with her cane and sat down hard in my kitchen chair.

“Irene, Tricia stopped me at the mailboxes. She asked me if you’d been repeating yourself.” Opal’s chin shook. “I told her the only thing you repeat is the Huskers’ offense. But she asked if you left the stove on. If you’d gotten lost driving. She asked like she was filling out a form.”

So when the man from the state called, I only needed the last piece to fall into place. It fell.

That is why I said Thursday. Tricia came at ten every Thursday with her own key, and I wanted that key and that folder to walk into my kitchen while the state man was still sitting at my table. I was finished with being talked about in rooms I was not in. If it was going to happen, it would happen where I could see it.

Why I did not call her

People have asked me since. Why didn’t I just call Tricia and tell her what I thought?

Because I knew exactly what I would say, and some of it was true. And every word of it, in a voice that shook, from a 78-year-old woman who had just been told she was unfit, would have gone into that folder as proof. Agitated. Suspicious of her family.

So I asked myself who actually knows me. Not the story of me that Tricia had built out of a photograph and a pile of mail. Who sees me?

I didn’t have to think hard.

Opal Reinke, 82, next door for forty years. She walks across at seven every morning, rain or ice, and drinks one cup of coffee at my table and tells me which part of her is acting up.

Evelyn Ingram, 74, across the road. She drove a school bus for forty-six years and has never stopped watching a road for trouble.

Nora Thornton, 61, a deacon at Immanuel Lutheran for fourteen years. She lives a half mile down the county road and walks her old beagle past my mailbox at 11:20 every day, and we talk five or six minutes at the fence, in every weather and every mood.

I called all three Tuesday night. I told each one the whole thing, plain, and then I said the same sentence to all of them.

“Tell him only what you have seen. If I did something foolish, tell him that too. I want the truth, not a story.”

Opal was quiet on the line. “Irene, you think I’d make something up?”

“I think you’d be tempted.”

“I would be,” she said. “But I won’t.”

I tried my son too. He was somewhere past Ogallala, on the long stretch where the signal drops, and I got his voice. I said, “Zane, a man from the state is coming to my house Thursday at nine, about me. I would like you there if you can be.” I did not say Tricia’s name. If it was going to be said, it would be said in front of the right people.

At six on Thursday morning the flip phone I keep in my apron pocket buzzed on the counter. It was Zane, from ten past midnight. “Mom, I just got your message. I’m in Ogallala. I’m turning around. I have cattle to drop at the Kearney sale barn by seven, and then I’m coming. Don’t let anybody tell you anything till I’m there.”

I played it twice. Then I got up and put the coffee on, three hours early.