The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

Easter Morning

Easter came early in April that year, and it came bright. There had been rain on Holy Saturday, and by Sunday morning the whole world was washed clean and shining, the maples in their first green haze.

On Thursday Mom had told me she wanted to go to early Mass, and that before Mass she wanted to walk to the mailbox.

“Verna says I can,” she said. “And I want Ferris there.” I called him, and he was quiet a moment, and then he said seven thirty.

Leon and I got there at seven. Verna was already there, though it was Sunday and she was not on the clock, in a pale yellow spring coat.

Ferris pulled in at seven twenty-five, shaved, in the good jacket he wore to Dad’s funeral.

Mom came out the front door on her own in her Easter dress, the navy one with the white collar that she made herself, her white hair pinned up and her cane in her hand.

She came down the porch steps one at a time, and nobody touched her.

At the bottom she caught her breath and looked down the long gravel drive. “All right,” she said.

“Verna, you get on this side. Ferris, you get on that side.” Ferris looked at me, and I nodded at him to go on.

He stood on Mom’s right side, the side with the new hip, and she put her hand through his arm.

Verna stood on her left with a hand light on Mom’s elbow. Not tight. Not leaving a mark. And my mother walked to her mailbox.

It took her six minutes. I know because I was watching the clock and crying, and Leon had his arm around me.

She stopped twice. The second time, she looked up at Ferris and said something I could not hear, and he laughed and wiped his eyes.

At the end of the drive she put her hand flat on top of the mailbox Dad put up, and stood there in the Easter sun.

“There,” she said. Then she looked back at all of us, and at the white house and Dad’s rocker on the porch, and smiled.

“Well,” she said. “Somebody get the car. We’ll be late for Mass.”

I asked Ferris later what she had said to him the second time she stopped. He was quiet for a minute. “She said, ‘Your dad would have bought Verna a slice of pie,'” he told me.

He took Verna out for pie after Mass. Rhubarb. She told me he paid with a five and told the waitress to keep the change.