Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

“I didn’t write you down because of the floor,” Mom said. “I wrote you down because I liked you.”

“Well,” Alma said. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I stood in the doorway holding the coffee, and I did not have enough hands to wipe my face. I set the pot on a table and poured a cup for Evelyn, who had been waiting, and a cup for Gladys, and one for Irene.

“We were not going to just sit by the phone anymore,” Kathleen told me quietly while I poured. “We were scared, Marcy. Nine days. A woman our age, in a house.”

“I know,” I said.

“You’ll forgive us if we’re not shy about it.”

“I’d be hurt if you were.”

Mom sat in the glider with the coffee cake in her lap and the whole sunny porch around her, wooden railings, gravel drive, the long windbreak bright behind the cars. She looked like a woman at her own party.

For a minute, nobody said anything. They just stood and sat and held their cups. A meadowlark was going somewhere out in the field.

Then I heard a truck on the county road, slowing, and I knew who it was before the grille came into view.

It was Craig’s work truck, white with his company name on the door, and he turned in at the mailbox at five to ten, exactly on time. He drove up the gravel slowly and stopped behind the third sedan.

He sat in the cab a good long while. I do not know what he saw. I know what I would have seen: eleven women on his mother’s porch with their cups held still in the air.

He got out in a clean blue shirt, pressed, and took off his ball cap and held it in both hands. He crossed the grass and stopped at the bottom of the steps, a big man of forty-eight with his father’s jaw and his father’s way of standing when he’s in the wrong.

“Mom,” he said.

Nobody answered him. The women looked at him, and he looked up at them, and the meadowlark out in the field was suddenly the loudest thing in Marion County.

My mother passed the coffee cake to Opal. I watched her face work, the way it does when she is deciding between being hurt and being kind. She did not decide out loud.

“Craig,” she said. “Don’t talk. Come up here and carry.”

He climbed the steps. She pointed at the porch railing, the glider, the wicker table Dad built, every flat place stacked with foil.

“The ham first,” Mom said. “Vivian’s arms are seventy-eight years old.”

So my brother carried. He took the ham from Vivian and the cinnamon rolls from Hazel and the bowl of eggs from Wilma, who patted his arm and told him to mind the dish towel. He went back and forth from the porch to the kitchen eleven times with a clean blue shirt going dark under the arms.