The Porch by the Bus Stop

Three Years

I packed three lunches every morning, one with no crusts, one with no cheese, one with everything. I drove Gracie to the church preschool and picked her up at eleven-thirty.

I learned that Owen would eat anything if you called it a dinosaur and cut it in a triangle.

I sat up with Owen through two winters of croup, in the bathroom with the hot shower running, singing him the same three hymns my mother sang to me.

I took Lily to her first piano lesson at the Methodist church and sat in the hallway and listened.

I bought the groceries. Every week, the grocery store in Clinton or the Aldi in Bloomington when I was over that way for the eye doctor.

I bought the shoes, and children go through shoes the way a combine goes through a field in October.

Nick was good to the kids. He read Lily chapter books in a voice he did for every character.

He taught Owen to cast a line off the dock at Clinton Lake. He let Gracie paint his fingernails pink on a Sunday afternoon and wore it to the jobsite Monday morning.

But he was not all right. I knew that. Some nights I would wake up at two and hear the garage door, and I would lie there and listen to him out there in the dark, crying where he thought nobody could hear. I never went out. A man needs one place.

Kelsey’s room was still hers, in a way. Her robe hung on the back of the bathroom door for almost two years.

Her handwriting was still on the calendar in the kitchen, and on the masking tape labels on the freezer bags, and on the recipe card for her chicken and noodles taped inside the cabinet.

That recipe was mine first, and my mother’s before me. Kelsey had added her own touches, a bay leaf and a pinch of nutmeg in the noodle dough.

On Sundays I made it from her card, and served it over mashed potatoes the way you do in central Illinois, and nobody at the table said a word.

Ashley

Nick met Ashley Varner, though she was Ashley Kemp then, at a friend’s Christmas party last winter, two and a half years after the funeral.

She was thirty, a receptionist at a dental office on the square, with a soft voice and a way of crouching down to talk to the kids at their level.

I liked her right away. I will not pretend I did not.

She came over for supper a few times that spring and always brought something, and she always washed the dishes, and she asked me questions about the kids that a person only asks when she means to love them.

They married in June in a small ceremony at the Lutheran church Ashley grew up in. I sat in the second pew with the kids.

Gracie was the flower girl and threw all her petals in one handful at the very start, and the whole church laughed, and Ashley laughed hardest of anybody.

I was happy for them. I want that said too. I sat in that pew and prayed for that marriage with my whole heart, because those three children deserved a mother in that house, and Nick deserved somebody to hold onto in the dark besides a garage wall.

Two weeks later, he sat across the kitchen table from me and called my house my rent.