The First Chair I Washed Her Hair In

What Renae Wanted

I should tell you about Renae, and I am going to try to be fair about it, because my mother raised me to be fair even when it is hard.

Renae married my brother Jeff nine years ago. Jeff drives a truck, long hauls, Indianapolis down to Birmingham and back, gone four and five days at a stretch. He is a good man and a tired one, and he has never been home enough to see clearly what goes on in this family when he is on the road.

Renae is not a stupid woman. She is a careful one. And somewhere in the last year she did the math that a lot of people do when there is an old woman with a paid-off farmhouse and eighty acres of good limestone-country ground.

My mother’s land is worth something. Not a fortune, but something. And the will, the last one Mama signed when her mind was still sharp, splits it even between Jeff and me.

Renae wanted it to not be even. She wanted everyone in this county to understand that she and Jeff were the ones who cared, and that I was the daughter who dumped her mother and ran. Because a story like that, told often enough, is the kind of thing that can make a family start talking about changing a will.

She had been laying it down for months. Little things. “Oh, I just worry Opal’s not getting looked after.” “I’d have her in my own home if it were up to me.” Said sweet, said sad, said to the right people.

She never once offered to drive her. She never sat a long afternoon in that room when my mother was frightened and did not know where she was.

She came to the home maybe four times all year. And every single visit she came with her phone out.

She would take a picture of herself holding Mama’s hand and put it on the Facebook with a sad little verse under it. Then she would be gone inside of twenty minutes.

I used to watch her car pull out of the lot and think, that is not devotion, that is a photograph of devotion. There is a world of difference, and my mother knew it even when she could not say it.

I knew what she was doing. I had known for a while. And I had let it go, because confronting her would have meant a family war in front of my mother, and my mother did not need that.

But a quiet lie whispered to a few people is one thing. A lie shouted under a dryer to a shop full of women who have known my family for fifty years is another thing entirely.