The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China

The truck was already backed up to the porch steps when I came outside with my funeral shoes in my hand, because I hadn’t wanted to scuff the heels walking across Mama’s gravel yard.

Terry had the tailgate down. He had moving blankets laid over the bed of the truck, the good quilted kind, the kind you rent from the U-Haul place in Hutchinson, and he had the straps already looped through the headboard rail like he’d practiced this.

“Terry,” I said. “What are you doing.”

He didn’t look at me right away. He had his shoulder against the china cabinet, Mama’s china cabinet, the one that had stood against the dining room wall since before either of us could remember, and he was walking it forward an inch at a time, the clawed feet scraping a groan out of the hardwood floor that I felt in my back teeth.

“Taking the cabinet,” he said. “And the dishes. I already boxed the dishes.”

I stood in the doorway in my stocking feet, holding my funeral shoes, and I looked past him into the dining room, and he had. He had boxed the dishes. There were six liquor-store boxes stacked by the china cabinet, newspaper sticking out of the tops of them, and I knew without looking what was folded into that newspaper, because I had wrapped glasses in newspaper at that table a hundred times for a hundred different holidays.

Eighty years of Desert Rose china. Franciscan pattern, the pink roses with the green leaves, made out in California, bought new from a shop in Wichita in 1944 by a young bride named Opal who was my grandmother, paid for a few dollars at a time out of egg money while her husband was overseas, and loved so hard and so long by every woman who came after her that there wasn’t a chip in the whole set, not one, not after eighty years and three generations of Sunday dinners.

And three hours from now we were burying the last woman who had set that table.

“You can’t just take it,” I said. “It’s the morning of the funeral, Terry.”

“That’s exactly why I’m taking it now.” He got his hip under the bottom shelf and walked the cabinet another inch. “Everybody’s going to be at the church. Nobody’s going to be standing around arguing about furniture while we’re trying to bury Mama.”

“So you’re doing it now so there’s nobody around to say anything.”

He straightened up then and looked at me, and his face was doing the thing it used to do when we were kids and he got caught, which was turn stubborn instead of sorry.