The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

Reva And Money

I need to tell this fair, because my sister is not a monster. I will not let this turn into a story where she is one.

Reva has always answered hard things with money. When her first marriage fell apart she went out and bought a boat she used twice.

When her girl got cut from the cheer squad, Reva bought the girl a car at sixteen. A real one. Red, with the bow still on it in the driveway.

Money is the language she reaches for when the feeling gets too big to hold in her two hands.

I think somewhere down deep she believes that if she spends enough, the ache will settle for the money and leave the rest of her alone.

And Mama dying was the biggest ache any of us had ever been handed. Reva did not know how to sit in it.

She has never known how to just sit in a hard thing and let it hurt her for a while. She has to get up. She has to do. She has to spend.

So she bought Daddy the most expensive object in the room. And she needed every one of us to watch her do it.

She needed it to be bigger than whatever I brought in my grocery sack, because to her, bigger was the same word as better, and better was the same word as love.

I knew all of that even while I sat there with my face going hot in front of the tree. I knew exactly why she was doing it.

Knowing why a thing happens does not take the sting out of it happening to you. If anything it makes the sting sharper, because you cannot even be clean about your anger.

Daddy did not know what to do with the phone. He held it in both hands the way you hold a baby somebody suddenly set in your arms.

“I do not know how to work this thing,” he said, quiet.

“I will set it up for you,” Reva said. “It does everything, Daddy. You can video-call me. You can see the grandbabies any time you want to see them.”

He nodded. He was trying so hard to be glad. He is a kind man and he did not want to hurt her.

But I watched his thumb rub back and forth across that cold glass, and I knew what he was thinking.

He was thinking that Mama would have known exactly what to say to make this not hurt. And Mama was four miles up the road under a stone that was still too new to have grass.