The Shower Held by the River

What Cyrus carved

I got up out of my lawn chair with Mitch’s hand under my elbow. Earl held the hood up toward the light, and there, carved so small I would never have found it by myself, was a line of letters.

For D. and the boys we are given. C.H. 1993.

Under it, a second line had been cut later, in a different hand, a little crooked. The cuts were deeper, the way a man’s hand goes when it has gotten tired.

For whoever comes next.

Fritz made a sound I will not forget. Rosalie put her hand over her mouth. “That was the winter he got sick,” she said through her fingers. “He kept going up to the attic. We all thought he was going through boxes.”

Mitch read it twice. Then he put his arm around his brother, and the two of them stood there with their faces turned away, two grown men in a gravel lot with their father’s cherry wood between them.

I looked up and saw that the whole Hollis side was crying quietly, and so was the line.

It had not been a trick or a speech. Nobody had made anyone do anything. It was a dead man’s note to a baby he would never meet, and it had sat in the attic for three years under a gray blanket, waiting for someone to turn it over.

Loretta set the first slice of cake in Rosalie’s hand herself. “Eat,” she said. “You’re feeding a family.”

Rosalie laughed, wetly, and ate it standing up.

What it cost her

I did not hear the rest until later, from Rosalie, over the phone, and I did not enjoy hearing it.

The Hollis side held a kitchen-table meeting at Rosalie’s house that morning, after Mitch left. Eleven households. They agreed that nobody would go to Donna’s for Sunday dinner until she had called me herself and said the true thing in her own voice. Rosalie said it was not a punishment. She said it was a door they would not walk through until Donna had opened it from her side.

Donna cooked for fourteen that Sunday. Rosalie drove past at one o’clock and saw her silver Buick in the drive and the dining room light on, and not one other car. She said she sat at the end of the road with her hands on the wheel for ten minutes. She did not turn in.

On Monday, Wanda Burris at the Legion told Rosalie that Donna had come in to ask for her name off the Christmas luncheon sign-up she had run for twenty-two years. Wanda handed it to Sharlene Dean without a word.

That was the consequence, and I will not dress it up. Donna had spent forty years being the woman who did right, in a good wool coat, with a church fan in her purse. In one weekend her own family stopped coming, and she found out how much of her standing had belonged to other people.

I did not want it for her. I did not want it taken from her, either. It was hers, and she had set it down herself.

The coffee can

Before the Hollis cars left the river, Rosalie came back to my chair with a white bank envelope.

“This is Donna’s hundred and fifty,” she said. “She wouldn’t hand it over. I went by the house at noon and took it out of her purse on the kitchen table. Don’t you look at me like that, I’m her sister. I’ve done worse to her than that since 1971.”

I laughed out loud for the first time since Thursday. Then I took the envelope and walked it across the shelter to Loretta, who was stacking foil pans at the end of the table.

“For the can,” I said. “Baby fund. For whoever’s next on the line.”

“Honey, no.”

“It’s for the next girl who has nobody to throw her anything.” Loretta set down the pan. She took the envelope in both hands and held it against her chest, and her chin did something I had never seen it do.

“With a label on it,” she said. “I’ll put a label.”

That can is still on the shelf above the break room microwave. It has bought a car seat for Lucille’s niece, a set of bunk beds for Valerie’s grandson, and six weeks of groceries for a girl on second shift whose husband left. Every time it runs low, Loretta puts in a five.