The Pew My Son Swore Off
Forty-three Christmas Eves. I never once looked at that window long enough for him to catch me looking. It was the closest he came, and I held it as dear as I have held anything.
When Harold died in August of 2015, Danny helped carry the casket up the church steps. Then he handed his corner to a cousin and stood in the back hall against the coat rack for the entire service, hands folded, jaw working. I could feel him through two walls. Afterward he took my arm and walked me down that aisle, looking at no one.
Harold had said it better than I ever could, the night after Tim’s burial. I was crying over the dishes and said, “I want to just ask him, Harold. Once.”
“Praying isn’t pushing, Marlene,” he said. “You pray. He’ll walk his own road.”
Near the end, in the hospital, Harold told me he would have liked to see Danny sit down. “But I’m not sorry we waited,” he said. “A man who’s pushed in the door goes out the window.”
So I never asked. But there was a second thing I did instead, and I have never told anyone about it, not even Pastor Henning.
Every March the eleventh, starting in 1984, I wrote Danny a letter.
Never a plea. Not one line of asking, ever. It was one page, one true thing about his brother. The time Tim put the barn cat in a choir robe and it sat through an entire rehearsal like a small furious bishop. The tin boat he built from a stock tank lid that sank in the pond in seven seconds, and how he stood in the water to his waist and said, “Well, she floated for six.” I wrote them so that Tim would not become a thing nobody said out loud. I signed every one, “Love, Mom.”
Forty-three letters. Danny never mentioned one, not on the phone, not at Christmas. Some years I imagined he read them at the mailbox and tossed them. Some years I imagined he tossed them unopened. I never held it against him. But I wrote the next March anyway, because a mother has to put her love somewhere.
I thought they had gone nowhere. That is the plain truth of it. I thought I had been writing to a closed door for forty-three years.
Phyllis stopped playing.
I heard it in the sudden quiet, the way you hear the refrigerator shut off. In that quiet Danny lifted his head and turned and looked at me.
His eyes were red. His face had gotten older than I’d noticed, a sixty-two-year-old man’s face with a nineteen-year-old’s look in it, the look of someone standing on a step in the slush.
“Morning, Mom,” he said. He said it carefully, like a man stepping out onto river ice.
I could not speak. I had promised not to ask him to come, and somewhere across forty-three years that promise had grown to mean I wouldn’t ask him anything about it at all. So I did not say, “Why now.” I walked the rest of the way down the aisle on knees I did not trust.