The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

The envelope from the circle

After the burial, the Wednesday circle served the funeral dinner in the church basement, the way they have served every funeral dinner in Dunmore since 1952.

Bernice caught Patty by the elbow at the dessert table. I was standing a few feet away holding a paper plate with a piece of pie on it, and I will remember her voice for the rest of my life.

“Patricia, honey, step in the kitchen a minute.”

Patty looked at me. I nodded.

They were gone ten minutes. When Patty came back her face was wet, and she was holding a plain white envelope in both hands like it might break.

“It is from the circle,” she said. “Bernice went around Sunday afternoon after the hill. They took up a collection out of coffee cans. They just said, Opal.” Her voice cracked. “Three thousand four hundred fifteen dollars, Colleen. In ones and fives and a lot of rolled quarters.”

“Patty.”

“There is a note.” She unfolded it with a shaking hand. It was a church bulletin with something written across the back. She read it out loud, and I will give it to you the way she did.

For Opal’s furnace, her medicine, and the thing you did not have to do for your mother. We were all too busy to see it. Forgive us. Bernice.

“I cannot take this,” she said.

“Yes, you can,” Bernice said from the kitchen door, and she did not raise her voice. “You carried that family alone for two years, and not one of us asked what it was costing you. Take it, honey. It is not charity. It is the church finally showing up.”

I took Patty’s hand.

“Take it,” I said.

Then I did something I had been planning since the bread drawer. I went to my purse and took out my checkbook, and I wrote a check for the county treasurer for next year’s property taxes, with room to spare. I handed it to Patty without a word, and she looked at it, and then she looked at me.

“That is mine to do,” I said. “I should have done it two years ago.”

She did not argue. She put her head on my shoulder in front of the whole church basement, and Gary came over and put his hand on her back.

What Mama said to Patty

Mama had one more good hour, the Tuesday evening after the funeral.

Around six, as the light slanted into the front room, Mama opened her eyes and said, “Patricia?”

Patty was in the kitchen. She came in drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Sit down, honey.”

Patty sat on the edge of the coffee table. Mama reached out and took her hand, and the oxygen hissed softly between them.

“I heard,” Mama said. “Bernice told me when she came by after the dinner with a casserole. I heard all of it.”

“Mama. I am so sorry. I sold the space that was yours and Daddy’s.”

“Hush.” Mama’s voice was thin but steady. “I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen with both ears.”

Patty bent her head.

“I would have sold it myself,” Mama said. “For my kitchen. If you had asked me, I would have said, Patricia, sell the grave and keep the house. A grave is a hole, and a kitchen is where I raised you girls. A grave does not know who is in it. But I do.”

“Mama.”

“I only wanted you to ask.” She squeezed Patty’s hand. “I did not want to be a burden, and so I made you carry me in secret, and that was foolish of me. I am an old fool, and I am sorry for it.”

I will never forget Patty’s face then. It broke open, and my sister, who had carried a sack of feed up a hill for two years without setting it down, put her head in Mama’s lap and cried like a child.

Mama stroked her hair. She looked at me over Patty’s shoulder, and she smiled.

“Colleen,” she said. “You did well on that hill.”

“I did not do anything, Mama. I only sat there.”

“That is the hardest thing there is,” Mama said. “Sitting there. Your daddy never could do it.”