The Drawings Behind the Stop Sign

“You let a nap matter more than my husband’s last good hour.” I said that to my daughter-in-law in my own kitchen, and my son told me to give them some space.

That was six years ago in March. I gave them the space. I gave them so much of it that I know the exact number of mornings in a school year.

I know it because I stood in the road at Church Street and Quarry Street for every one of them, in an orange vest, holding a stop paddle.

In all that time I never once said my grandson’s name out loud to his face.

My name is Wilma Threnody. I am sixty-six, I live in Harth Mills, Pennsylvania, and for thirty-one years I worked the deli counter at the Weis Markets out by the highway.

Not one customer ever saw anything in me but a woman in a hairnet who got the weight right on the first try. I am not a complicated person. I have only been a stubborn one my whole life.

Stubbornness can cost a woman more than complication ever could. Let me tell you about the kitchen first, because everything else is the price of it.

My husband Arlen spent eleven weeks in the county hospital that winter. It was his heart, and then his kidneys, and then everything. I slept in a vinyl recliner for most of those weeks.

I learned that you can hold a man’s hand for nine hours and he can still go in the ten minutes you step out to the vending machine.

The Thursday before the end, Arlen woke up clear as a bell for about an hour. The nurses told me later that it happens. They call it a rally.

He looked at me and said, “Where’s the little fella?”

The little fella was Braylin, our grandson. He was four years old that spring and had been fishing at the quarry pond with his grandfather since he could hold a pole.

Arlen had a green fishing hat with a hook-and-feather band. Braylin wore it down over his ears and called it his captain’s hat.

I said I would call. I phoned my son’s house, and Tamsen answered. I said it plain, with no warm-up, because I was tired down to the ground. Arlen was asking for the boy.

Tamsen said she would see what she could do. She did not bring him. Not Thursday, not Friday, not Saturday, not Sunday. Arlen slipped back under that Sunday morning and did not come out again. Arlen died that Sunday.

I want to be careful here. I did not know why. Nobody told me. The only reason I could have found was a laminated sign on the cardiac floor that winter, no visitors under twelve during flu season, and I never once read it. All I knew was that my husband asked for a four-year-old in the one clear hour he had left, and the boy did not come.

I also knew who kept him from coming. Tamsen is a licensed practical nurse who worked nights at the Valley Manor nursing home, and she sat with other people’s families in that last hour for a living.