Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

“I’m wearing my rose one.”

“Then you’re all set.”

At twenty to ten, I was at the stove with the coffee on when I heard tires on the gravel. I went to the front door and looked out through the screen.

Three sedans, one silver and two cream, were coming up the drive, one behind the other, slow, as though each driver had agreed to take the washboard ruts at the same pace. Dust drifted behind them over the milo field.

They parked on the gravel in a row, in front of the windbreak. The doors opened, and out they came.

Eleven women. The youngest was seventy-one and the oldest was eighty-nine. They climbed out in light jackets and cardigans and good church flats, and they carried foil-covered pans and Pyrex dishes in both arms.

Mindy drove the first car with three passengers. Kathleen drove the second with three. Fern, who is eighty-one and has a hip, drove the third with Opal beside her holding a coffee cake on her lap like a baby.

Alma got out of the back seat of the last car, and the doors of the other two kept opening until all eleven stood on the grass. She walked slowly, and she stopped at the foot of the porch steps and looked up.

I pushed open the screen door with my hip. I was carrying a full glass pot of coffee in one hand, the one Mom keeps for funerals and haying crews.

“Good morning,” I said. I could not say anything else. My throat had closed.

Mom came up behind me in the hallway and stopped. I felt her go still against my shoulder.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my.”

“Jeanette Weber,” Opal called from the bottom step, in her cracked bossy old voice. “Don’t you stand there with your mouth open. We drove nine miles.”

And my mother, who has never in her life cried in front of company, stepped out onto her own porch in her rose cardigan, with her hands out in front of her, shaking, shaking, and she laughed and laughed.

The first six reached the foot of the steps while the rest were still sorting out pans. They came up in a line. Opal went first with the coffee cake. She put it in Mom’s hands and folded back the foil, and the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar came up warm into the cool morning.

“Sour cream and streusel,” Opal said. “Your recipe. I’ve been making it for forty years and it’s never as good as yours.”

“It’s better,” Mom said. “You use more butter.”

“I use the same butter.”

“You use more.”

Behind them, the others filed up the steps and across the porch in their light jackets. They set their pans on the railing and on the old glider and on the wicker table that Dad built.

Hazel brought a pan of cinnamon rolls. Vivian brought a ham, an actual ham, and Wilma had hard-boiled eggs in a bowl with a dish towel over them. Irene brought napkins, bless her, because somebody always remembers the napkins.

They hugged her one at a time. Fern held on longest. Alma took Mom’s face in her two hands and said, “You wrote my name on that list when nobody else knew I was on the floor.”