The Sunday Mama Came Home

The drive

It is a twenty-minute drive from the county nursing home to Mama’s house on Pruitt Road. Mama didn’t say a word for the first ten minutes. She just looked out the window.

October in middle Tennessee is about as pretty as anything gets. The maples along the creek had gone red, and the poplars were yellow, and somebody’s sweet gum in a front yard was every color at once.

Then she folded her hands on the afghan. “Melissa, I want you to promise me something.”

“Okay.”

“Whatever happens when we pull in, you let me do the talking. It’s my house. I’ll say what needs saying.”

“Mama, he’s going to be…”

“He’s my boy,” she said. “I’ve been talking to him since before he could talk back. You let me do it.”

I promised.

Pulling in

We turned onto the gravel drive at about a quarter past two. The trees along the fence line were yellow and red, and the sun was coming in low and gold across the pasture.

Darren’s truck was under the carport. They were home from church already, earlier than I’d figured. My stomach dropped.

I drove past the carport and pulled right up to the front of the house, where the church ramp ran up the side of the porch steps, the weathered boards gray like the porch.

Mama saw the ramp and made a little sound in her throat.

“Ray Dillard built that for Brother Hollis,” she said. “I brought a chicken casserole to that work day.”

I got the wheelchair out of the trunk and unfolded it and locked the brakes. I helped her pivot from the car seat into it, good leg first, the walker folded across the back. I tucked the afghan over her lap again, the way Kaylin had.

Then I took hold of the handles and started up the ramp.

It’s a long ramp, and it takes some push at the end. I was halfway up when the front door opened.

Darren in the door

My brother stood in the doorway in a gray t-shirt, holding a cardboard box at his side. He had changed out of his church clothes. I could see the edge of a lamp shade sticking out of the box, and a picture frame.

His mouth was open. He didn’t say a word.

Mama, in her lavender robe, with her white hair curled from the beauty shop girl who comes to the nursing home on Fridays, looked up at him from the wheelchair and smiled.

It was the biggest smile I had seen on her face in five weeks.

“Well, hey, son,” she said. “I’m home.”

I pushed her up the rest of the ramp onto the porch. Under the eave, the red hummingbird feeder swung a little in the breeze, full to the brim with clear sugar water.

Darren still hadn’t moved. He was looking at Mama and at me and at the ramp, and his face was doing something I had not seen it do since we were kids and Daddy caught him with a cigarette behind the barn.

“Mel,” he said finally. His voice cracked on it. “What did you do?”

I opened my mouth. Mama lifted one finger off the afghan, and I shut it again.

“She brought me home,” Mama said. “Now put that box down and go get Tonya and the boys. We’re going to sit at my table.”