So I understood. I did. I am a school nurse. I know what an hour on cold ground does to a woman her age. I know what it does to the son who finds her that way.
But understanding a man’s reason is not the same thing as agreeing with what he did with it.
“You didn’t ask her,” I said.
“I have her power of attorney. I don’t have to ask her.” He heard how that sounded and his face changed a little. “I mean, I’m supposed to make the hard calls. That’s what she signed it for.”
Mom signed those papers the year after Dad died. Rod is the oldest, he lives closest, and he works steady at the co-op elevator. It made sense at the time. It still made sense, mostly.
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“Mom,” I said. “Is this what you want?”
She was looking out the window over the sink, toward the back. You could see the corner of the garden fence from there, the wire sagging where the snow had leaned on it all winter.
“I want you two not to fight about it,” she said. “That’s what I want.”
“Mom.”
“Let it go, Marnie.” She said it gently, and she said it to me, not to Rod. “It’s his to sell. It’s my name and his signature. Let it go.”
So that was the answer to the question everybody would ask me later. Why didn’t I fight it. The lot was in Mom’s name, Rod held her papers, and Mom asked me to let it go.
I could have hired somebody. I could have made a scene at the co-op or called the man at the bank.
But my mother had asked me, at her own kitchen table, not to put her children in a fight. I was not going to make her watch one.
Rod picked his keys back up. “It’s better this way. You’ll see. You can rest now, Mom. You’ve earned it.”
“I suppose I have,” she said.
He kissed the top of her head on his way out. He did love her. I want that said plainly. He kissed her, and he went out the back door, and he did not look at the garden fence once.
After his truck pulled away, Mom got up from the table. She went out onto the back porch in her house shoes and came back carrying a coffee can with a plastic lid.
It was dented on one side and the label was long gone.
Her seed tin. She had kept her saved seed in it for as long as I could remember. Bean seed from her own mother, tomato seed she dried on paper towels every September, envelopes marked in her careful school hand.
She set it on the table and put both hands on top of the lid, like you would put your hands on a Bible.
“Well,” she said. “That’s that.”
I drove home the three miles to our place with the scalloped potatoes still sitting on her stove. I forgot all about them. I cried most of the way, and I am not a crier.