The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

The bread drawer

I went back to Mama’s house alone that afternoon, because I had to know what the letter said.

I did not have to look hard. Mama’s kitchen has a bread drawer next to the stove, and she has always kept her mail there, behind the loaf of Wonder Bread and the box of wax paper. The drawer was full. I took out a stack of white envelopes and spread them on the kitchen table.

The first was dated two and a half years ago. The most recent had come eleven days earlier, and it was the one with the county seal.

Delinquent property taxes, Elm Street, Dunmore. The county treasurer wanted twenty-six hundred forty dollars and eighteen cents, plus interest and fees. Unless it was paid in full by the twentieth of December, the notice said, the property would be offered at the county tax sale.

Mama had stopped paying the taxes the year after Daddy died. Daddy had always done the paying, and she had never learned how. She had been too proud to ask, and then too confused to remember she had not. She had put every envelope in the bread drawer and shut it.

Patty had found them in September.

Under the stack of mail there was a legal pad, with Patty’s cramped, neat school-cafeteria handwriting on it. She had written columns in pencil. The county. The furnace, which had quit on the first cold night in October, and the repairman had needed an igniter and a service call that came to one hundred fifty-nine dollars and eighty-two cents. The pharmacy copay. Gas to Emporia.

At the bottom of the page she had added two numbers and drawn a box around the total.

$2,800.

I sat down in Mama’s kitchen chair. I did not cry. I looked at that box for a long time.

I would have written the check. That is the thing I could not get past. If Patty had called me any night in the past two years and said, Colleen, the taxes are behind, I would have written the check the same day, and then I would have felt very good about myself.

But I had never asked how Mama was getting by with her bills. I had never opened that drawer.

What Mama made her promise

Patty showed up at ten that night. I heard the bad muffler in the drive.

She did not come in. She sat on the back steps with her arms around her knees, in her work cardigan, and I went out and sat down beside her. For a while, neither of us said anything. The porch light drew moths. A dog was barking a long way off.

“Bernice called,” she said finally. “She said you took Mama up the hill.”

“I did.”

“The whole town saw.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Patty said, and her voice broke on the word.

“I said she would not know the difference,” Patty said. “I said it to Duane, and I said it to you. I said it to myself in the mirror. I said it so many times I almost believed it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because Mama made me promise.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “In September. She was clear that day. She was sitting at the table with the letter in her hand, and she said, Patricia, do not let them take my kitchen. And do not you tell Colleen.”

“Why not me?”

“Because you wanted to put her in a place in Topeka.” Patty said it without any heat. “Two years ago. You brought the brochure. Mama saw it. She kept it in the drawer with the letters. She told me she would sooner die on that porch swing than in a room with a rail on the bed.”

I had forgotten the brochure. It was a nice place. I had thought I was being a good daughter.

“I did not have it,” Patty said. “I tried. Gary has a little disability. I have the school. We did not have twenty-six hundred dollars. I went through everything I could sell, Colleen. His grandfather’s rifle. My wedding ring. It was not enough.” She looked out into the dark yard. “Then I thought about the plot.”

“And Mama’s grave bought Mama’s kitchen.”

“I thought, she is not going to know. I thought, a grave is a hole in the ground, and a house is where she is going to die.” Patty pressed her palms against her eyes. “I thought it a hundred times. And every time I said it out loud, it sounded worse.”

I held her.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “I should have asked.”

“You should have,” my sister said, and then, “I should have said.”