The Letter in My Sock Drawer

The Easter after Mom

Our mother, Helen Brandewie, died in January of 2015, in the night, at the nursing home on the edge of Greenville where she had spent her last fourteen months.

I will tell you where I was when it happened. I was asleep in Piqua, forty-five minutes away, with my phone on the nightstand. My sister called at ten to four. I was in the car by five to. By the time I came through the sliding doors, Mom was gone and Margie was sitting in the chair by the window with her coat still on, her hands in her lap, looking at nothing.

I put my arms around her. She let me. She didn’t put hers around me, but she let me, and I took that as a start.

Margie is three years older than I am. She is tall and loud, with the kind of laugh that makes strangers in a restaurant turn around and smile. When we were girls on the farm outside Rossburg we shared a bed until I was fourteen, and she ran my life the way she ran the chickens, firmly and with a good deal of pecking. I was the quiet one. She was the one who could back a hay wagon into the barn on the first try.

She stayed. That is the simplest way to say it. She married Don Henschen, who farmed north of Ansonia, and she lived fifteen minutes from our parents for the whole of her adult life. I married Wayne and followed a job to Piqua.

So when Mom got sick, there was never a question who would be there on a Tuesday. Margie worked the front desk at the hospital until three, and she went to the nursing home from there six days a week for fourteen months. She knew the aides by their children’s names. She knew how Mom liked the blanket, folded back at the left corner and not the right.

I came on Sundays. Forty-five minutes each way, after church, in my good shoes, with a thermos of the coffee Mom liked and a Tupperware of whatever I had made. I sat with her from one o’clock until four. We did the crossword. We sang. Mom could not tell you what she’d had for lunch, but she could still sing every verse of “Abide with Me,” and on Sundays, the two of us sang it.

I thought that was a good arrangement. I thought it was the best I could do.

The first holiday without her was Easter, April 5th. Margie hosted, because Margie always hosted, in her big farmhouse kitchen north of Ansonia with the cherry-print oilcloth and the wall phone that Don would not let her replace. She did a ham. Her daughter Tammy brought the rolls. My Jill and Kyle drove down with Wayne and me, and Don said grace, and his voice caught on the amen.

I had brought the green bean casserole.

You have to understand about the green bean casserole. My mother made it every Easter of my life, in a Pyrex dish with a blue lid, and she carried it in with both hands like an offering. I had made mine that morning from her recipe card, in her handwriting, which was already starting to feel like something in a museum. I wanted her on the table.

Margie lifted the foil. She looked at it a moment.

“You put the onions on before it baked,” she said.

“That’s how the card says.”

“The card says to put them on at the end. Mom put them on at the end, Arlene. I watched her do it for fifty years.”

“Mom put them on whenever she felt like it.”

“She did not.”

“Margie, it’s onions.”

“It’s the onions that go brown and bitter if you do it that way, and then everybody’s picking around them. She did it at the end.”

I was tired too. I had driven forty-five minutes every Sunday for fourteen months and stood on the wrong side of the real work, and I had a pile of small hurts I had never said out loud. The nurses looking past me to ask Margie. Being the visitor.

So I said it. I heard it come out of my mouth and I couldn’t take it back.