The Ramp With Four Names on the Rail

“I don’t need a house. I need y’all to talk to me. That’s what I’m mad about. Y’all sat in this kitchen and talked about me like I was furniture that came with the place.”

Kay started crying then, really crying, the way she did when she was six and broke Mama’s cake plate. Marla reached over and took my hand on the table, and I let her.

Mom did not say anything else.

She just reached out and found my other hand, and Teresa’s, and we sat there like that, the five of us around that little table, with the green cabinets and the pound cake between us.

My sisters came up the mountain more in May than they had all winter.

Marla came the next Saturday by herself and stayed two nights and gave Mom her bath so I could go to the grocery store alone. Teresa called every night after her shift instead of every Sunday.

Every visit, they walked up a ramp they did not pay for. And every visit, at the top, right where your hand goes on the rail, there were their names.

Mom rolled herself down that ramp every Sunday morning. Every Sunday she stopped at the top and ran her fingers along the four names before she started down. I asked her once why she always did that.

“Taking roll,” she said.

The first check came from Teresa in the mail on the second of June. Two thousand two hundred and fifty dollars. In the memo line she had written “Ramp, 1/4.”

Marla’s came two days later, the same amount, with a note folded around it in her school secretary handwriting. Kay’s came on the fifth.

I did the arithmetic at the kitchen table because that is what I do. Nine thousand divided four ways is two thousand two hundred and fifty. Three checks came to six thousand seven hundred and fifty.

My quarter was the one I had already paid. They had worked it out exactly so that all four of us had paid for the ramp the same.

I put the checks in the car account. It did not feel like getting paid back. It felt like getting counted.

The second Saturday in June, Kay drove up from Chattanooga by herself with a manila envelope on the passenger seat.

She came up the ramp and put her hand on her name at the top, and came in and sat down at the kitchen table, in the chair she had stood behind in April.

“I drew up a new one,” she said, and slid a paper out of the envelope. “It gives the house back to Mama for as long as she lives, and after that it goes to all four of us. Four names.”

She tapped the paper. “Teresa’s social worker friend looked it over, and so did a lawyer in Fort Payne. It undoes what we did. Marla and Teresa already signed their part at the bank in Huntsville.”

She did not hand Mom a pen. She handed the paper to me.

“Read it to her, Charlene,” Kay said. “Every word. Out loud. The way we should have done the first time.”

So I did. I sat at the table and read Mom the whole thing, start to finish, while Kay sat there and listened.

When I was done Mom asked me two questions, and I answered them, and then she nodded.