“Irene told me at the table,” Edna said, reading my face. “She said somebody who loved her too much told her not to come. I have known that girl my whole life, Donna. She never says a bad word about anybody.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “She doesn’t.”
I took Mom to the motel for an hour, then drove her to Cheryl’s, and she spent the rest of Sunday in a kitchen chair pulled up beside her sister’s bed. I will not tell you everything they said.
Some of it was about their mother, and some about Floyd, and a good deal of it was about a boy named Raymond who had asked Edna to a dance in 1953 and been told no because she had a pie in the oven.
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Edna fell asleep on Mom’s shoulder at three o’clock, and Mom sat there for two hours without moving, because she would not wake her.
Monday morning at nine, I came to take her home.
They said goodbye on the porch of the house where Edna had raised her children. Edna did not cry. She held Mom’s hand against her cheek for a long moment and said, “I will see you at the gate, Reenie. Save me a seat.”
“Which gate?”
“Whichever one is nearest the bus,” Edna said, and they both laughed until they could not stand up.
The driveway
We got home Monday at ten minutes to seven, in the dark. I could see the porch light on from the end of the street.
Mom had slept from Kansas City. Somewhere around Wichita she woke and told me, with her eyes still closed, that she was not afraid of dying anymore, that she had a place she wanted to go. I kept my hands on the wheel and did not trust my voice.
Tammy was standing in the driveway. Not on the porch. In the driveway, in her work jacket, with her hands in her pockets and her hair coming out of its clip. She had been standing there, I found out later, since five o’clock, because every ten minutes she had gone inside to check the clock and come back out.
I put the truck in park. Mom unbuckled her belt. I came around to her door, but she waved me off, and she climbed down the running board by herself, cane first, in the yellow light.
Tammy took a step toward her, and stopped. She stood with her arms tight against her chest. For a moment nobody said anything at all.
“Irene,” she said. “Irene, I owe you.”
“I know it,” Mom said.
“I took something from you. I told myself it was for your own good. It was not. It was because I was afraid, and I made you pay for it.” Tammy’s voice shook so hard I could barely make it out.
“I put forty dollars in the can, in the hutch, to start next year’s seat, and I called Bernice this morning and told the whole Bible study I lied. Every one of them.”
“Well,” Mom said, “that is a start.”
“And I have something else.” Tammy pulled an envelope out of her jacket. “It is the Thursday appointments. The cardiologist and the eye doctor and the lab. I wrote them all down. I thought, maybe Donna and Ned, if you would, could take some of them. I can’t do them all. I can’t do any of it all anymore. I thought I could, and I can’t.”