The Sunday Mama Came Home

The kitchen table

Mama’s kitchen table is oak, with one leaf in it, and it has been in that kitchen since 1971. Daddy carved our initials into the underside of it the year I was born, where Mama couldn’t see. She found them anyway, two years later, and left them.

I helped Mama up with the walker and walked beside her down the hall, one hand on the back of her robe, the way you do. Every step, she put the walker out first, and the bad leg, and then the good one.

It took us four minutes to go forty feet. Nobody rushed her.

She sat down at the head of the table, where she always sat, and I put a pillow behind her back and a cup of coffee in front of her with two sugars.

Darren sat at the other end. Tonya sat beside him. The boys stood against the counter until Mama looked at them, and then they sat too, Caleb on the bench and Luke on the step stool, because there weren’t enough chairs.

I stood by the stove. I didn’t sit down. It wasn’t my table to sit at, not today.

Mama wrapped both her hands around her coffee cup.

“Darren,” she said. “Tell me why.”

What Darren said

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at his hands on the oak table. He has Daddy’s hands, wide and scarred across the knuckles, with a nail that never grew back right from a pallet jack in 2009.

“I got laid off in April,” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“The tire plant cut the second shift. Two hundred and forty people. I had twenty-two years in, Mama, and it didn’t matter. They gave us eight weeks’ severance and a pamphlet about retraining.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Mama said.

“I didn’t tell anybody.” He kept looking at his hands. “I didn’t tell Mel. I didn’t tell the guys at church. I’ve been driving for a parts outfit out of Lebanon, but it’s half what I made, and no insurance. Tonya picked up hours at the Dollar General.”

Tonya nodded. Her eyes were red.

“By August we were two payments behind on the house. The bank sent a letter. Then a second one. I hid them in the truck so the boys wouldn’t see.”

He finally looked up. Not at Mama. At me.

“Then Mama fell. And I was sitting in that emergency room in Lebanon at two in the morning, and all I could think was, her house is paid for and it’s sitting empty. And my house could rent for twelve hundred. And twelve hundred would catch up the mortgage in four months.”

“So you put me in the nursing home,” Mama said. She didn’t say it hard. She just said it.

“I told myself it was for your hip. And it was, at first. You needed the rehab, Mama, you did.” He swallowed. “But then the therapist said you could go home, and I knew if you came home we’d have to leave. And we didn’t have anywhere to go. So I told the social worker there was nobody at the house.”

“There was nobody at the house,” Mama said. “Except you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

It was so quiet I could hear the clock over the stove ticking. It’s a rooster clock. It has been ticking over that stove for forty years.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I said. I hadn’t meant to say anything. It came out anyway.

Darren looked at me, and his chin did something it hadn’t done since he was nine years old.

“Because you’re the one who has it together, Mel. You always have. You’ve got Jeff and your job and you take care of everybody. And I’m fifty years old, and I couldn’t keep a roof over my own boys. I couldn’t stand for you to know.”