The Sunday Mama Came Home

What I found out

It didn’t take long to learn the rest. In a town of twenty-five hundred, nothing takes long.

My husband, Jeff, heard it at the feed store on Monday. Darren had rented out his own house on Maple Street, the brick ranch with the carport, to a young couple from the hospital. Twelve hundred dollars a month.

The week after Mama went into the nursing home, Darren and Tonya and the boys had moved into Mama’s house. Furniture and all. The man at the feed store said he helped Darren carry a sectional couch through Mama’s front door.

“Twelve hundred a month,” Jeff said that night, standing at our kitchen sink. “And no rent going out. That’s a pretty good deal, if it’s your mama’s house you’re living in for free.”

“It’s not like him,” I said.

“No,” Jeff said. “It’s not. Which makes me think something’s wrong.”

Why I didn’t call him

People have asked me since why I didn’t just call Darren and have it out with him. It’s a fair question.

The truth is I had called him. Four times in five weeks. Every call ended the same way. “It’s handled, Mel.” Then a click. My brother has never been a talker, and when he’s in trouble he gets quieter, not louder.

And I knew where a real fight would end up. It would end up in Mama’s room, with the two of us yelling across her bed while she sat there with a healing hip and her hands folded, ashamed of both her children.

I was not going to do that to Mama.

So I asked myself the only question that mattered. Not what Darren deserved. What Mama wanted.

And Mama had been telling everybody what she wanted every single day for five weeks. She wanted to go home.

Asking Mama

On Wednesday I went to see her on my lunch break. I brought her a fried pie from the gas station on the highway, the apple kind she likes and pretends she doesn’t.

She ate half of it and folded the wax paper over the rest for later. Then she looked at me with those sharp gray eyes.

“You’ve got something on your mind. You always did hold your mouth funny when you had something on your mind.”

I pulled the chair up close to the bed and lowered my voice, even though her roommate, a sweet lady named Mrs. Coble, was asleep with her hearing aids out.

“Mama, if you could go home Sunday, would you want to?”

“I’d go home this afternoon if somebody would carry me.”

“It would be me helping you. Every morning and every night, for a while. And therapy. And you’d have to use the walker every step, even to the bathroom, even at three in the morning. No cooking for a while.”

“I raised you,” she said. “I know how to mind a nurse.”

Then I told her the rest. I told her about Darren’s family being in the house. I watched her face while I said it, waiting for it to crumple.

It didn’t. It went very still instead. She looked out the window at the parking lot for a long minute.

“That’s why he won’t look at me,” she said finally. “I wondered. I thought maybe I looked worse than I felt.”

“Mama, I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” She smoothed the blanket. “Did they take my bed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” she said. “We’ll find out.”