The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

The Sunday I took Mama up the hill

Mama woke up clear.

Some mornings in those last weeks she was somewhere else, a girl in a kitchen in 1952. That Sunday she opened her eyes, looked straight at me, and said, “Colleen, what day is it?”

“Sunday, Mama.”

“Then I want my blue dress. And my hat with the pin.”

I do not know where she found the strength. I helped her into the blue dress with the white collar and pinned the little silver bar on her hat, and she looked at herself in the hall mirror and said, “Well. Walter would say I look like a fool.” And then she laughed, a real one.

Patty did not come. I had texted her at seven, and she had not answered.

I wheeled Mama into Mt. Hope Methodist with the oxygen tank riding on the back of the chair like a purse. She sang every hymn, or moved her lips on every hymn, and when they got to the Doxology her voice came through, cracked and perfectly on pitch. Pastor Lindquist stopped for a second and looked up at the ceiling.

When the last hymn ended, I did not push her toward the fellowship hall and the coffee. I turned the chair around and pushed her out the side door and up the gravel lane.

It is four hundred yards from the church steps to Lot 14. Every car in that gravel lot has a clear view of the whole hill. I had known that since I was six years old, running between the stones with my sister.

I set the brakes beside Daddy’s stone. I tucked the afghan around Mama’s knees.

Then I unfolded a lawn chair I had borrowed out of the church basement, and I put it on the grass at her side.

Mama put her hand on Daddy’s stone.

“Walter,” she said. “I am late.”