The phone rang while I was standing at my own kitchen sink with my hands in dishwater, and it was June from the shop, and the first thing she said was my name in that careful way people use right before they tell you something that is going to hurt.
“Loretta,” she said. “I think you ought to know what got said in here today.”
I turned the water off. I dried my hands on the towel that hangs on the oven door, the same towel that has hung there for eleven years, and I said all right, tell me.
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June runs the only beauty shop in our town. She has cut my hair since I was in high school. She does not gossip, which is why, when she does call, you listen.
“Renae was in,” she said. “Under the dryer, holding court. And she told the whole shop you had left your mama to rot in a filthy home and never go see her.”
I did not say anything for a second. Outside my window the light was going down behind the shed, that gray southern Indiana winter light that makes everything look like an old photograph.
“She said the place smells,” June went on, quieter now. “She said you dumped Opal there and washed your hands of her. She said it loud, Loretta. Darlene heard it. The Simmons girl heard it. Everybody under those dryers heard it.”
I thanked her. I told her I appreciated her calling me.
I hung up the phone. I stood there in my kitchen with the dishwater going cold.
And I will tell you the truth. My hands were shaking.
Not because I was afraid of Renae. I have never in my life been afraid of Renae.
My hands were shaking because I had just come from the home not two hours before.
I had been there at lunch, like I am every day. I had wiped my mother’s chin and held her cup and told her a story about the cardinals on my feeder until she smiled.
And now a woman was standing under a dryer telling the whole county I had thrown her away like a sack of trash.