The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook
We sat with that a minute. The pie was good, tart and sweet at once, the raisins soft. I understood why it was Greg’s favorite and why she had made it without meaning to.
Her hands do a thing on their own when her heart is heavy. They cook.
“I’ll tell you the real truth,” she said. “I have been scared to death since Ron went. Not of being alone in the day. Of being the kind of old woman her children dread the phone ringing from.”
“Needing a ride. Needing a man to come change a bulb. I did not want to be her. So when Greg put those keys in my hand and said it was all taken care of, I grabbed it like a life ring, Lori. I did not look at whose boat it came off of.”
“You’re not a burden,” I said. “We’ll figure your car out the right way. Together. You and me, we’ll go look this weekend.”
She squeezed my hand. The kettle clicked off.
Right about then I heard the crunch of tires, and a door, and boots on the back step. Greg came in from his second bummed ride of the day to find his mother and his wife sitting at the table eating his favorite pie with the Equinox back in the drive.
The Keys Back on the Hook
He stopped in the doorway. He looked at his mother’s red eyes and at the pie and at me, and I watched him understand the whole week at once.
The way you understand you left the water running only when you hear it hit the floor.
“Mom,” he said.
“Don’t you Mom me, Gregory.” Eileen stood up and pointed a finger at him that she had clearly been saving since Wednesday.
“You told me they had a car to spare. You let me drive this girl’s paid-off automobile to the Kroger while she rode with my friend’s husband. You bought yourself a fifty-nine-thousand-dollar truck and you couldn’t see past the hood of it to your own wife standing in the cold.”
She picked up her purse. “Your daddy decided everything for me for forty-six years and I let him, and I will not sit here and watch you do it to her.”
“Now I am going home. Lori is taking me to look at cars Saturday, the right way, and you are going to come and you are going to keep your mouth shut while the women handle it.”
She kissed my cheek and she went out. The Equinox started on the first try, twenty degrees out, the way it always did, and backed down the drive and was gone.