The Bus Seat She Gave Back

“Reenie?”

“Hello, Edna,” Mom said. “I brought you some pecans.”

The whole church breathed out. Somewhere behind me a man said, “Lord, Lord,” and a woman started to cry in the quiet way that women do in church.

Mom closed the last six steps. She did not wait for help. She sat down, not in the pew, but on the edge of the wooden step where the chair stood, so that she and her sister were face to face, and Edna reached up with both small hands and took Mom’s face between them, the way she had when Mom was six.

“You came,” Edna said. “You came the whole way.”

“Donna drove me.”

“Donna.” Edna’s eyes found me over Mom’s shoulder, wet and very bright. “Is that the Donna with the red pigtails?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I cut them off in 1979.”

Edna laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and then she was holding my mother by the collar of her coat and Mom was holding her, the two of them rocking in the aisle, two white heads together, and Edna was saying “my baby sister, my baby sister” over and over like a prayer she had said every night for sixty years.

Pastor Joe let it go on for a full minute before he spoke. When he did, his voice shook.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s all be seated. And let’s give these two a minute.”

We were. Cheryl slid into the pew beside me, and the pianist waited until Mom had been helped up and settled into the end of the third pew, her hand wrapped in Edna’s the whole time, a white handkerchief crushed between their two palms.

Pastor Joe said we would start with the hymn Edna asked for every Sunday, “In the Garden,” and the woman at the piano played it, and I did not hear a word of the service after that.

I was looking at the backs of two old women’s heads, leaning together, and thinking of a folded check on an oilcloth.

After the service Edna insisted on staying for coffee in the basement, and so did Mom. The women of the church set out a table that would have fed two hundred, ham and scalloped potatoes and green bean casserole, a tray of sour cream raisin pie, and they pushed Edna’s chair to the head of the table with Mom beside her.

“Floyd used to say you were the only one who laughed in the right place at his stories, Reenie,” Edna said. “He had a soft spot for you for fifty years and never said it. Don’t you tell Cheryl.”

“I’m sitting right here, Mother,” Cheryl said, and Edna cackled.

At one o’clock Mom’s eyes began to go heavy, and I got up to take her back to the motel for her pills and her rest.

Edna caught my hand.

“Donna,” she said. “Whoever told her she could not come, I would like to say something to that person.”

“She’s been told, Aunt Edna.”

“Then tell her again.” Edna’s voice was very soft and very steady. “Tell her an old woman said she took four days from me that I did not have to give. And then tell her I forgive her. Because I do. I forgive her the way you forgive somebody who was only afraid.”

I had not told Edna anything about Tammy. I had not said a word.