“Kendra phoned me,” Mom said, and I could hear her trying to make her voice sound like it was nothing. “She says I don’t need to come Friday. She’s got the seat covered.”
I was standing in a client’s side yard in Waverly with a load of her sheets over my arm, because her dryer had quit and she liked them on the line anyway.
It was a Saturday afternoon, bright and still, the kind of early October day when the maples along the road are just starting to go and the wasps get slow on the porch rail.
“What seat?” I said. I set the sheets down on the picnic table so I would not drop them in the grass. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
“Grandparents Day,” she said. “At Mason’s school. They’re only letting one guest per child this year. Kendra signed up for Mason’s spot, and she wanted me to know so I wouldn’t make the drive for nothing.”
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For a second I could not say anything at all. I just stood in that yard with a clothespin in my hand and looked at the hills.
My mother is Ione Saylor. She is seventy six years old, and she spent thirty one years as a fourth grade aide over in Jackson County, wiping noses and tying shoes and teaching long division to children whose parents never could.
She has driven the forty miles of two-lane from her house outside Oak Hill to Mason’s school every single Grandparents Day since he started kindergarten. Rain, fog, the year her knee was bad. Every one.
“She said that?” I asked. “Those words? That she had the seat covered?”
“She was nice about it,” Mom said, which is what Mom says about everybody. “She said, no sense you making the drive, Ione. She said it like she was doing me a favor.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, well, all right.” Mom was quiet a moment. “I’d already bought the dried apples, Bethany. I bought them at the Amish store Thursday. I was going to make him his pies.”
That was the part that went through me. Not the seat. The dried apples sitting in a paper sack on her counter, waiting for a Thursday that wasn’t coming.
I told her I would call her back. I hung the rest of her sheets with my hands shaking a little, and I did not let myself think about it until every last pin was on the line.
I should explain a few things, because when I tell this story people always want to know where everybody was and why I did not just pick up the phone and settle it.
Troy Lambert and I were married nine years. We divorced three years ago, when Mason was five. Nobody cheated and nobody threw anything. We just turned out to be two people who wanted different lives.