The Plain Pine Box Mama Asked For
“Why didn’t you say so Monday?”
“Because it was your sister’s heart that was being broken in my showroom,” Gordon said gently. “Not mine to hand her a receipt for.”
I put the phone down and held the edge of the counter.
Over the next two days, Noreen and I did what we had agreed. She picked the hymns and the flowers. On Wednesday afternoon, she met me at Mama’s closet on Cedar Street to pick the dress.
We said almost nothing. She went through the hangers one at a time, the way you flip pages in a book you have read before. She pulled out the blue wool dress with the white collar that Mama wore every Easter for thirty years. She laid it over her arm and went out to the car without another word.
The visitation was Wednesday evening, from five to eight, in the front room of the Teague Funeral Home.
Gordon had put the pine casket under the one good lamp, with a small table beside it and two jars of zinnias from Mama’s own garden, orange and pink and a scarlet that nearly hurt to look at. I had laid her wedding-ring quilt across the foot of the casket, the way you would lay it on a bed.
Mama lay in her blue Easter dress, her hands folded, her hair set the way Dorothea at the beauty shop had done it every Friday for forty years. She looked like a woman asleep on a made bed, which was exactly how she had wanted to look.
Noreen stood at the back of the room next to the guest book, with Gary on one side and her son Cole on the other, in a black dress with her arms crossed over her chest. She had decided, I think, to endure it.
I had braced all week for whispers and pitying looks. That is not what came.
They came in out of the October dusk in their feed caps and church coats, smelling of diesel and cold air. The line ran out the door and down the front steps to the corner: farmers with their caps in their hands, women from the Methodist circle who had eaten at her table for fifty years, and grown men who stood by the casket and could not talk.
“She slipped me a dollar every Friday for the milk money,” a tall man in a canvas coat said. He was a county deputy, I found out later, but just then he was a boy in a lunch line. “I never did tell her I knew where it came from.”
And over and over, one person after another reached out and touched the pine lid. They put their hands on it, flat, the way you would put a hand on a barn door or a good kitchen table, and many of them held it there a second before they walked on.
“That’s just like her,” said Lester Voss, who is eighty-nine and who I have known since I was a baby. “No frills, all substance. Looks like her kitchen table.”
“It looks like home,” said a woman I did not know.
“It looks like Irene,” said another.
I looked across the room at Noreen. I saw her hear that. I saw her take it in, and I saw something in her face shift, the way a field looks different when a cloud moves off it. She did not uncross her arms. But she was watching the line, and she was watching their hands.