The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

“No, Duane, she won’t know the difference.”

My sister said it in Mama’s kitchen with her back to the hallway, one hand flat on the counter and the other holding the cord of the wall phone Mama still refuses to give up. The cord reaches clear to the stove. Patty had stretched it all the way to the window over the sink, where she stood looking out at the clothesline.

I was in the hallway with a basket of towels against my hip. I had come in the back door a minute earlier, and neither of us had heard the other. That is how I know she was not saying it for my benefit. She said it the way you say something you have practiced in the truck on the way over.

“Tuesday at ten is fine,” she went on. “Wendell has the paper. Joyce goes in the Hartman plot, right next to Daddy, just like he asked.”

Then she laughed, one short sound with nothing in it.

I set the basket down very slowly on the hall floor.

Twelve feet from the recliner

Mama was twelve feet away in the front room, in her recliner, under the green afghan she crocheted in 1983. She was asleep with her mouth a little open and the oxygen tubing looped over her ears. Eight weeks earlier a doctor in Emporia had said the word hospice, and he had said it gently, to both of us, the way you hand someone a hot dish with a towel around it.

My name is Colleen Brandt. I am fifty-one years old, and I manage the front office of a dental practice in Topeka, two hours up the turnpike and then the county roads from my mother’s house in Dunmore, Kansas. Dunmore has eight hundred people, a grain elevator, a Casey’s, and Mt. Hope Methodist Church at the foot of a limestone hill. My husband Rick drives a delivery truck for a lumberyard. We have been married twenty-six years.

My sister Patty is forty-eight and still lives in Dunmore, six blocks from Mama. She works the lunch line at the school and cleans the church on Saturdays. Her husband Gary hurt his back at the elevator six years ago and has not worked a full week since.

For two years, Patty has been the one who drives Mama to every appointment. I have been the one who drives down on weekends, brings groceries I picked up in Topeka, and feels like a good daughter for it. I want to be honest about that up front, because it matters later.

I understood it before she hung up. Mama’s burial plot, the one beside Daddy on the hill, had been sold. And Mama was not even gone yet.

Patty put the phone back on the wall and turned around.

She saw my face, and she did not flinch.

“Don’t start, Colleen,” she said.