The Two Chairs On The Lawn

And it came out, over the next week, in pieces, the way these things do.

The money was gone because they had needed it. That was the whole bottom of it. Sheryl’s husband had lost his hours at the plant in the spring and had not told anybody, out of pride, and they were behind, badly behind, the kind of behind where you move money around at night and do not sleep. And Gary had co-signed on something for them that was coming due.

When the party money came in, three thousand dollars sitting there in an account with our names attached to the reason, it was more cash than either of them had seen in one place in a year, and in a weak hour they had used it. And then they had told the family we were too tired, because that was easier than telling the family they were drowning.

They were ashamed. That is the truth of it. They did a low thing out of a high kind of shame, the shame that will not let a grown child say to his people, I am failing and I need help.

What I did with that

Here is where Ruth and the church ladies will want me to say I forgave them clean and we all cried and it was mended. And here is where Brenda down at the salon will want me to say I let them have it.

I will not lie to either one.

Gary came out to the house the next Saturday. He stood on my porch, a man of forty-eight, and he could not look at me, and he told me all of it, and he cried, and he said he would pay every dollar back to every person, which he has started to do, in pieces, out of pride he can no longer afford.

I let him cry. I did not rush to say it was all right, because it was not all right, and he did not need his mother papering over it the way I papered over Kay’s phone call. A thing does not get mended by somebody pretending it is not broke.

I told him I loved him. I told him that his father and I would have given them the three thousand dollars outright, and more, and gladly, the minute they asked, and that the thing I could not get past was not the money. It was that they thought the money was worth more than our name and worth more than the truth, and that they let Donald give his fifty dollars and his half-pills to a dinner they had already decided to cancel.

He flinched at Donald. Good. He should have.

“You go to Donald yourself,” I said. “You go to Ray and to your cousin and you say it to their faces, what you did and why. Not a check in the mail. Your face. And then we’ll see about mended.”

He has been doing it. It is slow and it is hard and it should be. Sheryl has had the harder road of the two of them, being prouder, but she sat at my table again last month and she said it out loud, the whole of it, and we cried the right kind of tears, which are not the easy kind.

I am not going to tell you it is all tied up with a bow. My son and my daughter did a cold thing in a weak hour, and the warmth they stole from us the Lord and the Mount Olive congregation handed right back on a church lawn, and the two of those facts have to live in the same house in me now, and they do.