The Deed I Gave on Mother’s Day

“Let the stupid old woman talk,” Troy said, reaching past me for the tea pitcher. “She’ll be done by Christmas.”

It was a Thursday in April, and I had only asked whether anybody had seen the redbuds out on the Wellston road. That was all. I had said one sentence about trees.

Bella giggled. She was five, and her daddy had said something with a funny shape to it, and she laughed the way children laugh at anything the big man at the table says.

Then she looked at me to see if it was all right.

Jace, who was four, laughed because his sister laughed. He had mashed potatoes on his chin and no idea what any of it meant.

He just knew that the table was laughing and he wanted in.

My daughter Heather looked down at her plate. She cut a piece of chicken she had already cut.

She did not look at her husband and she did not look at me, and that was the part that stayed with me all the way home.

I said, “Well, they’re pretty this year,” and I finished my supper. I helped clear the table. I kissed the kids goodbye and I drove home in the dark with both hands on the wheel.

That was how it went in the little house on Oak Street.

It had gone that way for almost three years, at nearly every supper I ate there, and I ate there most Thursdays and every holiday.

The little house

My name is Marcy Engel. I am 55 years old, and I have carried a rural mail route out of our post office in central Oklahoma for nineteen years.

It is 96 miles a day and a little over five hundred boxes, most of them gravel road.

I drive it in an old right-hand-drive Jeep I bought used from a carrier who retired out of Prague.

The house on Oak Street was my mother’s. She bought it in 1979 after my daddy passed, two bedrooms and one bath and a kitchen just big enough for a table and six chairs if nobody pushed back too far.

Mother lived there until she was eighty-four. She grew carnations along the front walk because they were cheap and they came back, and she said a flower that comes back every year has better manners than most people.

When she died, the house came to me. Dale and I already had our own place out on the county road, so we fixed up Mother’s house and rented it to a schoolteacher for a few years.

Then Dale had his heart attack at the co-op, loading feed, and he was gone before the ambulance got there.

That was six years ago this fall. Dale was the kind of man who would have set his fork down and said, “Son, we don’t talk like that at a table.”

He would have said it once, and calm, and that would have been the end of it.

But Dale was not there. That is the first thing I want anybody to understand.

There was no man in my corner at that table, and I had to work out what to do on my own.