The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

Marcia was not clapping. She had her hand over her mouth.

I took that to mean she was moved. I told myself that for a year.

I found out the rest of it three weeks later, standing at the deli counter at the Kroger in Wapakoneta, waiting on a pound of sliced turkey.

A woman from the Ridgeley Methodist ladies’ circle was ahead of me, a talker, and she turned around and saw me and brightened up. “Joanne! Isn’t it wonderful about the cantata? Janet says it was all your sister’s idea, and so thoughtful.”

I said something. I do not know what. Probably “mm-hm,” which is what a person says when the floor has moved under her.

“Marcia told Janet in September that your mother had been struggling,” the woman went on. “She said it would break her heart if Dot cracked again in front of everybody. Janet felt just terrible about the call, but you know, it is a mercy, when you think about it.”

“A mercy,” I said.

I left the turkey sitting on the scale. I walked out to my truck and sat with both hands on the wheel, and I thought about my sister.

Marcia is four years older than I am. She is fifty-two, and she has a good job in the billing office at the hospital in Lima, and a husband, Brian, who coaches junior high wrestling and says almost nothing. She has a nice house with a laundry room as big as my kitchen.

She is also the one who has always handled the hard conversations in our family. When Dad got sick, she made the calls to the doctors. When it was time to move his hospital bed into the front room, she did that, too, and she was right to.

So I knew, sitting in that truck, that she had not done it to be cruel. That was almost the worst part. Marcia does not know how to be cruel. She only knows how to be in charge.

I could have driven to her house that same afternoon. I did not. I had promised Mom no scene, and a promise to my mother is the one thing in my life I have never broken.

And I was afraid, if I am honest, that if I went in there I would not be able to stop myself.

I did not say a word to Marcia from that day on. We saw each other at Thanksgiving at Mom’s, and I passed her the sweet potatoes and she passed me the rolls, and neither of us mentioned Janet or the cantata or anything but the weather.

Mom said the grace. Mom carved the turkey. Mom laughed at one of Brian’s dry little jokes. She was the picture of a woman at peace, and I wanted to throw the gravy boat across the room.

On the first Saturday in December, Steve found me in the garage with the lights off.

My husband is a big, slow, quiet man who runs a combine for two farmers and fixes everyone else’s equipment on the side. He had been watching me all fall, the way he watches the sky before a storm, and he had not said one word about it.

“Jo,” he said. “Are you gonna sit out here till Christmas?”

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s what I figured.” He leaned in the door frame. “Sing for you, does she? Your mom?”

“All the time. In the kitchen. In the car. She hums over the dishes.”