The Check I Framed Over Her Chair

Neither did I.

“Mama, did you see Carly framed your check?” Emmett said, grinning, reaching for the biscuits. “Most expensive picture in the house.”

“I saw it,” Delphine said.

“I told her she’s too proud.” He held the biscuits out to his mother. “Daddy, did you know she offered Carly fifty thousand dollars?”

Wendell looked at his wife. Then he looked at the frame. Then he looked at me. His face did not change, but he took a long time buttering his biscuit.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

I passed Delphine the green beans. “These are the ones you canned last summer, Mr. Larrabee. From the end of the tomato rows.”

“Pole beans,” Wendell said. “Kentucky Wonders. They did good last year.”

“They did,” I said.

That was the whole of the first Sunday. Delphine ate about half of what she usually ate, which was not much to begin with. She left at two, which was early. She hugged Emmett at the door and patted my arm without looking at me.

On Wednesday she called and asked whether I would like her to come by and help me with the curtains in the front room, since she knew a woman in Spring Hill who did alterations. I said that was kind of her but I had them handled.

On Thursday she texted Emmett a picture of a house for sale on the other side of Columbia, three bedrooms and a carport, and wrote, For when you two are ready. He showed it to me at supper, pleased.

“She’s trying, Carly,” he said.

“I know she is,” I said, and I did know. I just was not sure yet what she was trying to do.

The second Sunday, I made a roast. Delphine came in and set down a plate of deviled eggs, and before she even took off her sweater, she walked around the table to the chair at the far end by the back door and put her hand on it.

“I thought I’d sit down here today,” she said. “Give somebody else the warm seat.”

“Mama, that’s your seat,” Emmett said. He came around the table, pulled her usual chair out, and stood holding it for her like a gentleman. “Come on. You’re always cold.”

There was nothing she could do. She went and sat under it.

Emmett pushed her chair in and squeezed her shoulder and went back to his place. A minute later he passed her the mashed potatoes, and she took them, and she looked up at the frame while she spooned some onto her plate.

I am telling you, I did not enjoy it. People think I did. Some days I wonder whether I should have. But every time she looked up, I felt it in my own stomach, too.

What I did instead was cook. I made her favorite things. I found out from Wendell, on the porch, that she liked a coconut cake her own mother used to make, and the next Sunday I made one from scratch out of an old church cookbook.

The third Sunday, Delphine brought a chess pie and hardly ate any of it. She talked to Emmett about work, about a lineman he went to school with who had fallen and broken his hip. She talked to Wendell about his blood pressure.