Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

Opal called my cell at ten to seven on a Thursday morning in October, crying so hard that I could not make out a single word she said.

I was standing in my kitchen in McPherson with my work boots in one hand and a travel mug in the other. Harvest had been running us fourteen hours a day at the co-op, and I had been up since five.

“Slow down, Opal,” I said. “Who is this?”

“It’s Opal Mayfield, honey. From Mom’s list. Marcy, I think your mother has passed in that house and nobody knows it.”

My coffee hit the floor. I remember the sound the mug made more than I remember the words, a hollow knock and then the lid rolling under the table.

Opal is eighty-four years old. In all the years I have known her, she had never once called my phone. She had to find the number in the church directory, and she had to ask her granddaughter how to dial a cell.

“I have called that house every morning for nine days,” she said. “It says the number is not in service. Jeanette has never missed a morning in six years.”

“Opal, I’m leaving right now. Stay by your phone. I’ll call you from the house.”

I did not stop for the boots. I drove to Mom’s in my socks with the boots on the passenger seat, forty minutes of highway and then a mile of gravel, and I prayed the whole way.

I prayed the way you do when you already know you should have done something days ago and cannot say aloud what it was.

Because I had known. Not the whole of it, but enough. Four days earlier, on Sunday evening, I had called Mom’s landline the way I do every week, and a recording had told me the number was no longer in service.

I tried her cell phone. It rang out. I told myself the line was down, that the Lutheran ladies had a supper, that she was at somebody’s table with her purse on the floor.

Then it was Monday and the soybeans were coming in wet, and I had two trucks backed up at the scale and a farmer yelling at me about moisture. I let it go. I have thought about that every single day since.

The gravel drive was empty except for Mom’s old garden hose lying across it. Melvin’s milo stood brown and dry in the field across the road, waiting for the combine.

I ran up the porch steps in my socks. The screen door was latched from the inside, which it never is.

“Mom!” I pounded on the frame. “Mom, it’s Marcy!”

Nothing. Then a chair scraped in the kitchen, and I heard slow footsteps, and my mother’s face appeared behind the screen.

She was wearing her rose cardigan, buttoned wrong by one button. Her silver hair was combed and pinned the way she has done it every day of my life.

“Marcy?” She unlatched the door. “Is it Sunday?”

“It’s Thursday, Mom.” I took her by both arms. She felt thin through the wool, but she was warm and she was standing and she was looking at me like I was the one who had gone strange.