The Camper in the Side Yard

She stopped. The rain hammered the roof.

“He didn’t ask me,” she said. “He told me. At supper. Like he was telling me the price of milk. And I said nothing. Not one word, Amy.”

“I got up and cleared the table,” she said. “I moved the crib into the corner of our room. The next week Irene moved in, and she lived with us for eleven years.”

“Eleven years,” I said.

“She was not a kind woman,” Phyllis said. “I do not say that about many people. I bathed her and fed her and changed her bed, and I raised three babies around her.”

“And I never once told Ron what that did to me,” she said. “Not because he would have been cruel. Because he never asked, and I decided a good wife did not need to be asked.”

She looked down at her hands on the quilt.

“I regretted every one of those years,” she said. “Not the caring for her. Somebody had to, and I would do it again. I regretted that I never said a word.”

“Every day I kept my mouth shut,” she said, “I taught my boys that this is how a man runs a house. He decides, and his wife makes the bed.”

The kettle whistled. I did not get up.

“Ron would have listened if I had ever said anything,” she said. “I know that now. I didn’t know it then. Brian learned it from his father and from me. Mostly from me.”

“Phyllis,” I said. “You don’t have to…”

“I never asked for your bedroom, Amy,” she said. “I would have slept on a cot in the kitchen. I was so ashamed when I saw those blue sheets I could hardly breathe.”

“And then I stood at that back door,” she said, “and I watched you carry that pillow out here, and I thought, there it is. That’s the thing I should have done in 1971.”

She reached over and took my hand in her cold, spotted one.

“You’re not being childish,” she said. “Kevin means well and he talks too much. You’re doing the one thing I never had the nerve to do. And I am not letting my son think this is about a bedroom.”

Back Across the Yard

I walked her back to the house myself, with the barn coat over both of us and the flashlight in my teeth, one walker step at a time. It took eleven minutes. I checked the kitchen clock.

Brian was standing in the kitchen in his socks, white as a sheet. He had heard the back door and found her bed empty.

“Mom,” he said. “What were you thinking.”

“I was thinking I had something to say to your wife,” she said. “Now I have something to say to you. But not tonight. I’m wet, and I’m tired. In the morning.”

I got her into a dry nightgown and back into bed, and I sat with her until her hands were warm. Then I went back out to the camper and listened to the rain until it quit, sometime around four.