The Debt I Carried for Thirty-Four Years

Thursdays

Mother’s mind started to go in the winter of 2021. It went like a field going back to prairie, one fence line at a time. First she forgot where the good scissors were, and then she forgot what they were for. By the fall of that year she was calling me Orval, and she would set the table for six and look at it, and then for four, and then she would sit down in front of the plates and ask me where everybody was.

Irma and I had the weekdays, Loyd and Glenys had Fridays, and Gaylen came Sundays after church and sat in the kitchen with Mother for an hour, and she was bright for him. But nobody had Thursdays, until Rosalee did.

I did not ask her. She called Irma in the fall of 2021 and said she had heard Dorcas was failing and that she would like to come, if the family did not mind. She was Gaylen’s wife for twenty-one years and had not been in that kitchen for eighteen, since the divorce, though she had sent a card to every funeral and a ham to Dad’s. She was fifty-nine years old and she drove fifty minutes from Springfield every Thursday for twenty-seven months. She washed Mother’s hair in the kitchen sink. She read her the Quillan Record out loud, the whole paper, even the legal notices. She sat with her on the porch swing in the afternoons when it was warm and under a quilt on the davenport when it was not.

Mother asked for her. That is what I cannot get past. In the last year, when she did not know the month or the president or which of her sons was standing in front of her, she knew the Thursday. She would be at the window by noon. She would say, “Is Rosalee coming?” and I would say, “She’s coming, Mother,” and she would say, “She’s late.” And at four, when the Buick came up the lane, Mother’s whole face lit up like a lamp somebody had finally found the cord for.

On Thursday, the eleventh of January, 2024, Rosalee washed Mother’s hair and set it. On Saturday, the thirteenth, Mother died in the bed in the front room, at a quarter past four in the afternoon, with Irma on one side and me on the other. In the hour before, in a clear spell that the nurse said was common and that I have never trusted, she opened her eyes and said, “Set the table for all of you together.” Then she looked at the door and said, “Is Rosalee here?”

I had an answer ready. I always did. I said, “She’s coming, Mother.”

That is what I took into the grove last year. I will not call it an excuse. When I wrote the names on the back of that envelope, I wrote them the way my mother had said them. Verlin and Irma, Loyd and Glenys, Gaylen and Rosalee. All of you together. I told myself that nobody on earth would think a brass plate on a post was a statement about anyone’s marriage, and that Rosalee had earned a name on a roof for twenty-seven Thursdays.

She had. That part I still believe.

But I had a pen in my hand, and a letter from Twila’s check in my visor, and I knew exactly whose name I was not writing. I will tell you the truth of it. Part of me was not sorry to leave it out. Part of me was relieved there was a reason.