The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
Kristen’s mother, Janet, died of cancer on the ninth of March, 1994. Kristen was twelve. I never knew Janet, though I have come to know her over the years, the way you learn a person from the things they leave in a house. A cookbook with her handwriting in the margins. Her laugh on the old church camp videos, the high one that tipped over into a snort and made her cover her mouth. She died in the front room of the house on Pruitt Road with her daughter holding one hand and her husband holding the other.
Two and a half years later, that husband brought home a lunch lady from the school cafeteria and asked his girl to be kind.
I would like to tell you Kristen was kind. She was not. She was a heartbroken child who had been handed a woman she had not asked for, and she did the one thing she could do, which was keep the door closed. She called me Marcia from the first day, in a tone that made the word sound like a piece of paper she had to carry out to the trash. She set her mother’s place at the supper table for the first two Christmases, a plate and a fork and no food, and Ed would look at his hands. She slammed the screen door so hard one spring that it came off the top hinge. I did not tell her to stop. I fixed the hinge that night with Ed’s drill and said nothing.
I made my decisions about her early, sitting up late at the kitchen table. I would never ask her to call me Mom. I would never say a word against her mother, in that house or any other. I would never make her choose between me and her father, because I knew exactly who would win and I had no interest in forcing a child to lose. What I could do was show up. Every ball game, every recital, every graduation. A plate on the table that had food on it. A light left on in the hall.
She left for college at eighteen and did not come home much. She married Brad Hargis, a decent, quiet man who sells farm equipment, and settled in Lexington, and they had a boy, Wyatt, and then a girl, Ellie. I sat in the back at her wedding. I just thought it would be a kindness to leave the front pews to the people she wanted to see there. Something in her was set like concrete, and I came to believe I would carry the shape of that wall to my grave and that it was not mine to knock down.
On the second Sunday of October, Ed went out to pull the last of his tomato vines.
I was in the kitchen putting up a pot of soup beans when I heard the back door, and then a sound I will not describe, a kind of heavy quiet, and I went out onto the porch with a wooden spoon still in my hand and found my husband sitting on the bottom step with his hand pressed flat against his chest and his face the color of dishwater.
“Marcie,” he said. Nobody has called me that in thirty years but him. “I don’t feel right.”