The Name That Stopped the Legion Hall
She nodded. She would not look at me. “I had it all worked out. You’d go back to work in the spring. I’d keep the baby. You’d pay me, and I’d have a reason to get up in the morning, and the lights would stay on, and nobody would ever have to know the plant closed.”
“Mama,” I said. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“Because I was ashamed,” she said. “Do you understand that? I’m your mother. I’m supposed to be helping you. Not standing in your kitchen with my hand out. I worked my whole life so I would never have to ask you for anything.”
“So you decided to tell fifty people instead.”
“I decided if I said it in front of everybody, you couldn’t say no.” She put her face in her hands.
“I know. I know how it sounds. I lay awake all Friday night working up to it. I thought if it sounded like a done deal, it would be one.”
“And then you grabbed the knife.”
She laughed into her hands, a wet, awful laugh. “I don’t even know why I did that. I was so nervous. I’d been carrying that cake around all morning knowing it was pink, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just wanted one thing that day to be mine.”
I reached across the table and put my hand on her arm, the same way I had put my hand on Josh’s arm in the Legion hall. She did not pull away.
“Mama,” I said, “I’m not scared that you’ll be useless. I’ve never thought of you as useless one day in my life. You’re the hardest working woman I know.”
“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “I feel like a woman who sits on the couch all day watching game shows. I feel like nobody needs me for anything. You’ve got Josh. You’ve got Opal. You’ve got your whole life. And I’ve got a garden going to rot.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I need you. The baby’s going to need you.”
She shook her head. “Not four days a week, she’s not. You made that pretty clear.”
“Not four days,” I said. “And not for two hundred dollars a week either, because that’s more than Little Lambs charges for five full days, Mama, and Josh and I can’t afford that and you know it.”
She winced. But she nodded. She knew.
“Here’s what I can do,” I said. “Two days a week. Tuesday and Thursday. I’ll pay you sixty dollars a day, a hundred and twenty a week, and I’ll pay it honest, cash every Friday, not as a favor and not as charity. You’d be working for it.”
She looked at me. “Sixty a day is less than I made at the plant.”
“I know it is,” I said. “It’s what we can afford. And it leaves you three days a week to find something else. You’re going to find something, Mama. You’re the most stubborn woman in Perry County. Somebody is going to have the sense to hire you.”
“And the other three days?”
“Little Lambs,” I said. “We’re on the list. If a spot opens, we take it. If it doesn’t, we’ll figure it out. Josh’s sister said she could help some.”
My mother sat there and stared at the table for a long time. Then her face just came apart.