The Sunday Mama Came Home

The front room

He set the box down on the porch boards. Then he stepped back out of the doorway, and I pushed Mama into her own front room.

It didn’t look like her front room. Darren’s big sectional couch took up the whole wall where her rocker used to be. There were boxes stacked three high along the hall, labeled in black marker. Kitchen. Boys winter. Tonya bathroom.

Mama looked at all of it. She didn’t say anything about any of it.

“Where’s my rocker?” she asked.

“It’s in your room, Mama,” Darren said from behind us. “We didn’t touch your room. Tonya wouldn’t let anybody in there.”

I looked at him. He was standing in the doorway with his big hands hanging at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Push me back there,” Mama said. “I want to see.”

Her bed

The hall to Mama’s room is narrow, but I’ve pushed wheelchairs down narrower. I turned the corner into her bedroom and stopped.

It was exactly the way she had left it, except cleaner. The bed was made with her blue chenille spread, pulled tight and square. Her rocker sat by the window with her sewing basket beside it.

Her glasses case was on the nightstand where she’d left it the morning she fell. Her house slippers were lined up under the bed. Somebody had dusted. Somebody had vacuumed, because I could see the lines in the carpet.

And on the dresser, in a jelly glass of water, there were three yellow mums from the bed by the well house.

Mama put her hand over her mouth.

Behind us, I heard footsteps in the hall. Tonya stood there in her church dress, still in her stocking feet, with her two boys behind her. The older one, Caleb, was sixteen and already taller than his daddy. The younger one, Luke, was thirteen and still had his church shirt buttoned all the way up.

“Miss Jo Ann,” Tonya said. Her voice was shaking. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you. I should have told you.”

“Who put the mums in here?” Mama asked.

Tonya looked at the floor. “I did. I change them every week. I wanted it to be nice for when you came home.”

Mama was quiet a long moment.

“Help me into my bed,” she said to me. “I want to lie in my own bed for ten minutes. Then everybody’s coming to my kitchen table.”

Ten minutes

I did the transfer the way I’ve done it a thousand times. Brakes locked. Walker in front. Good leg first. Mama stood, turned, and sat down on the edge of her own bed, and then I helped her swing her legs up, slow, keeping the bad hip in line.

She lay back on her own pillow and closed her eyes.

“Oh,” she said. Just that. “Oh.”

I stood beside the bed and held her hand. In the hallway I could hear Darren talking low to his boys, and Tonya crying softly, and the refrigerator humming in the kitchen the way it has hummed my whole life.

After a while Mama opened her eyes.

“It smells like home,” she said. “That place smelled like bleach and gravy.”

“I know, Mama.”

“You did good, Melissa.” She squeezed my hand. “Now go put the coffee on. Your brother’s going to need it.”