Forty Brushes for Mom’s White Fence

So yes. It had gone gray in long patches where the paint was gone, and the white that was left had curled up like birch bark.

Three posts at the far end leaned toward the ditch where the ground stays wet.

But you could still see what it had been. When the sun came across the pasture in the morning, the old white still caught it.

Mom’s last horse, a chestnut mare almost as old in horse years as Mom, still grazed up close against it.

I am 47. I cook at the hospital in town, the early shift, five in the morning to one thirty.

I make scrambled eggs for two hundred people and meatloaf on Thursdays. I live fifteen minutes from Mom’s, in a rented house with a good porch.

My brother Dean is 52. He has been a lineman for the electric co-op for 29 years.

He is the kind of man who goes out in an ice storm and comes home three days later and does not talk about it.

Dean married Sheree when they were both in their twenties. She is 50 now. They live in town in a brick house with a lawn service.

I want to be fair to her, because the rest of this story is not going to be very fair to her for a while.

Sheree is the one who found Mom in March.

Mom had gone out to the barn in the morning with a bucket for the mare, and the ground was soft from rain, and she went down on her hip by the water trough. She could not get up. She lay there almost an hour.

Sheree had stopped by on her way to work to drop off a casserole dish. She heard Mom calling.

She got her up, got her to the house, got her to the clinic. Nothing was broken. Mom had a bruise the size of a dinner plate.

Since that day Sheree has been after Mom to sell. Twenty-two acres, a barn, a house with a well, a fence along the road.

She has a real estate agent she goes to church with. She has said the word “assisted” in front of Mom more than once.

I understood it. I still understand it. Being scared for somebody you love will make you say ugly things.

But Sheree had not said those ugly things to Mom. She had said them to half the women at church.

And she had not just said Mom should sell. She had said to let the fence fall so Mom would have to.

That is a different thing. That is waiting for somebody’s heart to break so you can get your way.

On the drive home that Sunday, Mom was quiet. I thought she was just tired. I found out the next day she was not.