The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

She turned and looked at Marcia at last.

“You’re late,” my mother said.

I have never seen a face crumple so fast. Marcia, who has made every hard phone call in our family for thirty years, put her program over her eyes and bent at the waist.

“Mama,” she said. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”

We got her into the cab of the truck, finally, because her knees were shaking and she’d have never admitted it standing up. Steve cranked the heater and handed her the thermos, and the crowd drifted back toward the gym in small knots, still talking, still glancing over their shoulders at us.

The program started eleven minutes late. I’m told Janet Moser stood in the lobby the whole time with her hand over her mouth and could not seem to find the doors.

Marcia sat in the back seat of the king cab, and I sat up front beside Mom, and for a while nobody said anything at all. The heater ticked. A last few cars were pulling out of the lot.

“I wasn’t going to sit through the program,” Marcia said, finally, to the back of Mom’s head. “I came to the school because I thought, if I sat in the audience and heard Kelsey sing it, I’d be able to tell myself I’d done the right thing.”

“Did you?” Mom asked.

“I got as far as the lobby.”

She was holding the program in both hands, folded smaller and smaller.

“I heard you from inside. I heard you through the glass. I knew it was you in the first four words. And everyone around me just stopped talking and drifted for the doors, and I stood there like a fool with my coffee.”

“You are not a fool,” Mom said.

“I am, Mama. I’m the biggest fool in Auglaize County.” Her voice cracked clean in half.

“I did it to protect you. That’s what I told myself. I saw your face last year, standing up there after that note. I saw you smile, and I knew that smile. It was the exact smile you wore at Daddy’s funeral. And I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t sit in that gym every December and wait for you to break.”

I turned in my seat. I wanted to say something sharp and I had a good one ready, believe me. But I looked at my sister’s face, and the sharp thing died in my mouth.

“You’re eighty-four,” Marcia said. “You got old, and I didn’t want to watch it. I wanted to do something, anything, so I did the one thing I could do. I went and talked to Janet. I thought if I took the singing away first, you wouldn’t have to lose it in front of everyone.”

“You didn’t take it away first,” Mom said. “You took it away instead.”

Marcia nodded. She did not argue.

“Marcia.” Mom’s voice was very steady. “Do you know what your father said to me the night before his surgery?”

“No.”

“He said, ‘Dot, when I can’t do the work any more, don’t you dare take it off the list for my own good. Let me do it badly.'”

The back seat was silent.

“I am going to sing badly,” my mother said, “until I can’t make a sound. Is that clear? And when the day comes that I can’t, I will tell you myself. It’s mine to tell. Not yours, and not Janet’s.”