The Hallway They Left My Mother In

I walked into my brother’s dining room with a bowl of mashed potatoes still warm against my stomach and the first thing I noticed was the empty space at the head of the table.

Mama’s chair. The good one, the one with the armrests Rick had screwed a little higher so she could push up out of it easier. Empty. Her plate wasn’t even there.

“Where’s Mama,” I said.

Nobody answered right away. My niece Katie was cutting a roll in half for her toddler. My son in law was reaching for the gravy. Dana was at the stove with her back to me, spooning green beans into a serving dish like nothing in the world was wrong.

“She’s resting,” Dana said, not turning around. “I took her out for a minute.”

“Resting where.”

“The hallway. It’s quiet there.”

I set the potatoes down on the table so hard a little jumped onto the cloth. I did not yell. I want that understood, because what I did next is going to sound like I came in swinging, and I did not. I have never in fifty six years raised my voice at that woman, and I didn’t start that Sunday either. I just pushed my chair back from the table I hadn’t even sat down in yet, and I went to go find my mother.

The hallway between Rick and Dana’s kitchen and the downstairs bathroom is maybe eight feet long, no window, one of those runner rugs on the floor that always slides under a wheelchair wheel. The dining room light was on behind me, warm and yellow and full of noise, kids laughing, a football game murmuring from the other room. The hallway had no light on at all. Just what spilled in from the kitchen doorway and from the strip under the bathroom door.

Mama was parked against the wall, facing nothing. Her plate was in her lap, the ham cut into pieces too big for her to manage, the green beans already going cold, a fork sitting untouched on the napkin because her right hand hasn’t had the strength to hold one steady since her stroke two years ago, not without somebody steadying her wrist first. She had her head down. Not crying. Just down, the way she gets when she’s trying very hard not to be any trouble to anybody.

“Mama.”

She looked up at me and tried to smile, and that smile is the thing I will carry to my own grave. It was an apologizing smile. My eighty four year old mother, sitting alone in the dark with a plate of food going cold in her lap, tried to apologize to me with her face for being an inconvenience to her own family at Sunday dinner.