Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

Eleven women. Four of them no longer drove. Two lived out where the cell signal drops to nothing, and had a landline because of it. Half of them had no one in town at all.

Mom never made a speech about it, and she never mentioned it at church. She just did it, every morning, with a cup of coffee in her other hand.

I stood in her kitchen that Thursday and understood that for nine days, the eleven of them had waited by their phones at seven o’clock. Each of them had called Mom, and each one had got the recording.

And each one had to wonder, in the way women her age wonder, whether this was the day.

I called my brother from the porch. I made myself walk out the screen door and down the steps so Mom would not hear.

Craig answered on the second ring. He is forty-eight and installs furnaces and air conditioners out of Newton, and I could hear his truck engine under his voice.

“Marcy? What’s wrong?”

“Did you shut off Mom’s phone?”

He was quiet for about two seconds. “The landline? Yeah. It was thirty-eight dollars a month, Marcy. She has the cell. I put it on my plan.”

“She can’t use the cell.”

“She never said that.”

“She never says anything, Craig. She didn’t tell you she couldn’t see to read the print on the Medicare statements, either, and you found that out three years late.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nine days,” I said. “Nobody could reach her for nine days. Opal Mayfield thought she was dead.”

I heard the engine idle down. He had pulled over, I think.

“Nobody told me,” he said, and I could hear him thinking it through, and I could hear that he was not lying. “I figured if she needed something she’d call.”

“On what?”

He did not answer that. After a moment, in a smaller voice, he said, “I was just trying to cut everything I could, Marcy. You know what we’re still paying.”

I did know. Dad had died the spring before last, after sixteen months of cancer, eleven weeks of that in the hospital in Wichita. Medicare and the supplement had covered most of it, but not all.

There was a balance of twenty-two thousand dollars that Craig had put on a payment plan, four hundred dollars a month, out of Mom’s checking account that he managed. He had cut the cable. He had cut the second freezer. He had cut the thirty-eight dollars.

He had been doing the sums at night at his own kitchen table for a year and a half, and he had never asked what any one of those lines was for.

I stood on the porch looking at the three steps that led down to the gravel and the long windbreak of spruce that Dad planted the year I was born.

I could have shouted. I wanted to. I had a whole speech in my chest, and it was a good one.