My husband and my mother couldn’t stand each other for forty years. At her viewing, I saw him stand alone at her casket and slip a folded paper beneath her hands.
“Nobody’ll ever know,” he whispered. “I promise.”
I had never once heard him say a kind word to her. I stood in the doorway with my lipstick still open in my hand, trying to understand what I had just seen. Before I could ask, the funeral director came in and closed the lid.
Mama called Del “that Okie.” He called her “the Colonel,” though never to her face. At Thanksgiving they sat at opposite ends of the table. I sat between them and passed the rolls like a referee.
I sold Avon door to door in Glendale for forty years. The ladies on my route called me Ding-Dong Ruthie, and I answered to it. Once a month, I balanced Mama’s checkbook at her kitchen table. Her Social Security went in on the third, same as mine.
“Don’t you touch my money, missy,” she’d say. “Just add it.”
The fight between them began with a lie, and the lie was mine.
In 1986, I borrowed two thousand dollars from Mama. I told her it was for a transmission. It was for Del’s card debt from a Friday-night poker game at the lodge. Mama heard about it from a woman at her beauty shop and blamed Del for the money for the rest of her life.
“You’re a thief and a card shark, Del Barlow,” she told him at our kitchen table.
I was there. I could have told her the truth. I didn’t. Del never told her, either. He let her believe it was his fault.
I kept telling myself I’d set things straight when there was a better time. Then there wasn’t. I’m nervous even writing this down, but the truth is I liked having an excuse not to choose between them.
Mama lived alone in a little stucco house twenty minutes from us. She was ninety-four and sharp as a tack. She said she played bridge with the ladies from her street on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings. I took her at her word.
Six years ago, my grandson got sick in Tucson. I stayed there most of two years helping my daughter, Kinley. When I came home, Mama looked tired and thinner. She had a purple bruise on her arm.
“What happened to your arm?” I asked.
“That fool cat jumped right on me,” she said.
I believed her because I wanted to. I didn’t ask a second time.
Three weeks before the viewing, Mama died in her sleep in her own bed. Her doctor’s paper said heart failure. At ninety-four, no one was surprised but me.
Del took it harder than I understood. That night he sat in his truck in the driveway for an hour with the engine off.
“You okay, hon?” I asked through the window.
“Just tired, Ruthie.”
He didn’t say anything else. At the time, I let him have his quiet. After I saw him at the casket, that hour came back to me.
When we got home from the viewing, I asked him plainly, “What did you put in Mama’s casket?”
He was rinsing his cup. He didn’t turn around.
“Just saying goodbye, Ruthie.”
“To a woman you couldn’t stand?”
He set the cup in the rack carefully. “I’m tired.”
Then he went to bed. I stayed awake. At three in the morning, I thought about money. Mama’s house. Some ugly thing between them that I’d never been told. Under all of it was my own old lie.
Maybe she’d found out it was me. Maybe Del had finally told her.
The next morning, I started noticing things I’d stopped seeing. For six years, Del had left the house three mornings a week, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and come home around ten.
“Coffee with the old boys at McDonald’s,” he always said. “Then Home Depot.”
I kept the mileage book for his truck because we used it for our taxes. I pulled it out and checked the numbers. The truck had put on more miles than a man going for coffee had any business putting on. He’d never brought home a thing from Home Depot.
When Kinley called that night, I told her about the paper.
“Mama,” she said, “you go digging into that, you might find something you can’t unknow.”
“Maybe I already have.”
“You want me to come over?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
She paused. “You could ask him.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He said he was saying goodbye.”
Kinley let out a small breath. “That doesn’t answer it.”
No, it didn’t. I still didn’t tell her about the money I’d taken from Mama or the lie I’d left Del carrying.
I didn’t know how to fit that into the conversation without making everything else about me.
We buried Mama on Thursday. Friday morning, I heard Del’s truck start. Friday wasn’t one of his days.
I pulled my coat over my nightgown, grabbed my keys, and followed him down the freeway, a block behind him, in the dark. I’m not proud of following my own husband. I was frightened of what I might learn, and more frightened that I’d let him leave without knowing.
He drove out of town and pulled into the lot of a low tan building with a little rock garden out front. Lights were on inside. He parked but didn’t get out. He sat with both hands on the wheel.
A nurse in blue scrubs came out carrying two cups of coffee. She walked right up to his window like she’d done it many times. I couldn’t hear what they said. I saw her reach in and put a hand on his arm. Del put his face in his hands.
After a while, she went inside. Del followed, carrying a pink box of donuts.
I sat in my car for a minute. Then I got out and walked to his truck. The driver’s door wasn’t locked. The pocket was stuffed with folded papers, dozens of them, maybe a hundred. The old ones had gone soft as cloth.
I pulled one out. It had Mama’s name and birthday typed at the top, with days and times listed down one side. Across the top were the words “ATTENDANCE RECORD.”
The nurse was coming back out when I reached the building. I held up the paper.
“Is this Mama’s?”
She stopped. “You’re Ruthie?”
My mouth went dry. “Yes. What is this place?”
“It’s a day program. Your mother came here on those days.”
“Those were the mornings she said she played bridge.”
The nurse looked at the paper, then at me. “She did play bridge here.”
I looked through the glass. Del was inside with the donuts. “How long?”
The nurse didn’t answer right away. “A long time.”
Del came to the doorway and saw the paper in my hand. He looked tired, but not surprised.
“You followed me,” he said.
“I did. What is this?”
“Come inside, Ruthie.”
“I’m asking you now.”
He glanced toward the nurse. “Those are her attendance slips. She asked me not to tell you.”
The nurse stayed near the door. “She came for the program and to see her friends,” she said. “Del brought her.”
I looked at him. “Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday?”
“Most of them.”
“And you told me McDonald’s.”
“I knew what I told you.”
“What did you promise her?”
Del’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look away. “That I wouldn’t tell you she needed a hand getting here.”
“She was living alone.”
“She wanted to keep living there. And she did.”
The nurse lowered her eyes to the coffee cups she was holding. “She asked us to let her have her privacy.”
I had taken Mama’s sharpness for proof that she had no trouble. I had taken her word about bridge and never wondered how she got there. Del was standing in the one place I hadn’t thought to look.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him.
“She didn’t want you to worry. You were already helping Kinley.”
“That was years ago.”
“I know.”
“Did you ever think I might have wanted to know?”
He took a breath and rubbed a thumb over the edge of his sleeve. “Yes. I thought about it. She asked me not to, and I said I wouldn’t.”
The nurse offered to make a copy of the record. I said I wanted to take the slips home, and Del nodded. He didn’t reach for them.
In the truck on the way back, I kept the attendance record in my lap. I wanted to be angry at him for lying. I was angry. But I couldn’t make the lie mean what I had feared it meant.
“What was the paper you put in her casket?” I asked.
“Something I wrote to her.”
“What did it say?”
He watched the road. “That I’d kept my promise.”
I looked down at the record. “She asked you to keep all this from me?”
“She asked me not to make a fuss about it. She didn’t want you to think she couldn’t manage.”
“And you agreed.”
“I did.”
At home, I called Kinley and asked her to come over. I didn’t want to make Del explain it twice, and I couldn’t keep the other truth back another day.
When Kinley arrived, she saw the papers spread across the table.
“What are these?”
“Mama’s attendance records,” I said. “Del drove her to a day program three mornings a week. She’d been going for years.”
Kinley looked at Del. “You did that?”
He nodded. “Your grandmother asked me to keep it private.”
“And you never told us?”
“She wanted it that way.”
Kinley sat down. “She told me she was playing bridge with her neighbors.”
“She played bridge at the program,” Del said. “She didn’t make it up. She just didn’t tell you where.”
I could hear the defense in my own voice before I spoke. “I thought she was fine.”
Kinley looked at me. “You came back and saw that bruise.”
“I did.”
“And you believed the cat?”
“I wanted to.”
No one answered. Del didn’t use the moment to blame me. That made it harder to move on to the thing I had to say.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something from before all this.”
Del looked at me. Kinley did too.
“In 1986, Mama gave me two thousand dollars. I told her it was for a transmission. It was for Del’s card debt.”
Kinley stared at me. “You told Grandma that?”
“Yes.”
“And she blamed Dad all these years?”
“Yes.”
Del spoke quietly. “Ruthie.”
“I know. I should’ve told her then. I should’ve told you both.”
“Why didn’t you?” Kinley asked.
“I was ashamed. Then I got used to waiting for the right time. That’s all it was.”
It sounded small when I said it. It had taken up a large part of our family.
Del leaned back from the table. “I didn’t ask you to let her think that.”
“No. You didn’t.”
“You could’ve told her.”
“I could have. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t tell me it was all right. He didn’t have to. Kinley picked up one of the records and read the dates down the side.
“She asked you to do this, and you did,” she said to him.
“She asked me not to tell.”
“I hear you.”
I looked at the papers. “I told her the lie in the first place. I can’t tell her the truth now.”
Kinley set the sheet down. “You can tell us.”
So I did. I told her the exact reason I’d borrowed the money, and that Del had paid it back. I didn’t turn the old lie into a misunderstanding or claim I’d forgotten. I had known for years what Mama believed, and I let her keep believing it.
Del sat through the whole thing without interrupting. When I finished, he said, “I’m not carrying it anymore.”
“You shouldn’t have had to.”
The next time Kinley and I talked with family about Mama, I corrected the story. I told them the money had gone to Del’s card debt and that he hadn’t stolen from her. I didn’t ask anyone to excuse what I’d done. Del had spent forty years being called a thief for something I had done.
The attendance records went in the drawer with Mama’s checkbook papers. I kept them because they showed what she had asked Del to keep private, and because they reminded me that I’d mistaken not knowing for not needing to ask.
For the first time, Del and I could talk about Mama without pretending the old story was true. I had finally told the truth.
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