I went back to the truck for the last box. It was the heavy one. The good dishes. The Blue Willow set that had belonged to Mom’s mother. I had my navy work jacket zipped all the way up because the wind was coming hard off the field across the road.
I was halfway up the porch steps with that box when I heard the truck.
It came down Persimmon Street slow, the way a big rental truck comes when the driver isn’t used to it. A long orange moving truck with the ramp folded up underneath. It turned into the driveway and stopped at the edge of the gravel, short of the porch.
A woman with dyed red hair was behind the wheel.
It was Tammy.
She put it in park. Her window was already down. She didn’t turn the engine off. She didn’t get out.
She looked at the porch. She looked at me, standing on the steps with a cardboard box in my arms.
And then she looked at my mother. In her lavender cardigan. On the porch swing. Holding her coffee.
My mother looked right back at her.For a long minute, nobody moved.
The engine idled. A few leaves blew across the driveway and under the truck. Somewhere down the street, a dog was barking at something.
Then Mom lifted her coffee mug. Just a little. Not a toast. Not a joke. Just the way you’d lift a hand to a neighbor you didn’t know very well.
Inside the house, I heard Dad’s boots cross the kitchen floor.
The screen door banged behind me. Dad came out onto the porch in his barn coat and stood at the top of the steps. He didn’t come down.
“Dennis,” Tammy said.
Her voice was very calm. That’s what got me. I’d heard her laugh loud at things that weren’t funny, but I’d never heard her this calm.
“Who is that on the swing?”
“That’s Linda,” Dad said.
“Your ex-wife.”
“Yes.”
“What is she doing on your porch at eight o’clock in the morning with a cup of coffee?”
Dad took a breath. I watched him do it. I watched him decide, right there in front of all of us, whether or not to lie.
“It’s her porch, Tammy,” he said.
Tammy didn’t move.
“She owns half the house,” Dad said. “Shane owns the other half. I don’t own any of it. Not one board. I’ve lived here free for six years because the two of them bought it so I’d have somewhere to go. I should have told you that in March.”
Tammy didn’t say anything.
“She moved in yesterday,” Dad went on. “Front bedroom. Her lease was up. It was always supposed to be hers when she retired. I knew that. I just didn’t let myself think about it.”
“You told me this was your house,” Tammy said.
“I know I did.”
“I have two grown boys sleeping on my sister’s floor with a German shepherd,” Tammy said. Her voice was still calm, but her hands were tight on the steering wheel. “I gave notice at my place. I paid $340 for this truck. I told my sister we’d be out of her hair by tonight.”
“I know.”
Mom stood up off the swing.
I thought for a second she was going to say something hard. I braced myself for it. But she didn’t.
She walked to the porch rail and set her coffee down on it.
“Tammy, honey,” she said. “I am sorry. He should have told you. That’s not on you, and it’s not on your boys. If you want to come in and have a cup of coffee and figure this out, the pot’s on.”
Tammy looked at her for a long time.
Then she shook her head. Slow.
“No, ma’am,” she said. “Thank you. But I’m not moving my boys into a house with a man’s ex-wife in the front bedroom. I’m 58 years old. I’ve done enough stupid things already.”
She looked at Dad one more time.
“You call me when you know what’s true, Dennis,” she said.
Then she put that truck in reverse. She checked her mirrors carefully, like a woman who’d been told to by the man at the rental counter. And she backed that long orange truck out of the driveway without unloading one single thing.
We all watched it go down Persimmon Street.
Nobody said a word until it turned the corner by the Methodist churchI stood on the steps with the box of Blue Willow dishes in my arms. I’d been holding it the whole time. My arms were shaking, and I honestly didn’t know if it was the weight.
Dad stood at the top of the steps for a long minute.
Then he walked over to the porch swing. And he sat down on it.
On the other end. The end June used to sit on.
He hadn’t sat on that swing next to my mother in twenty years. I’m not sure he’d sat next to her anywhere in twenty years, except one row apart at June’s funeral.
Mom looked at him. Then she picked her coffee up off the rail and sat back down on her end of the swing.
She had a thermos on the porch floor by her feet. I hadn’t noticed it before. She unscrewed the lid, poured coffee into the cap, and handed it across to him.
“You still take it black?” she said.
“I take it however it comes these days.”
She laughed. Just a little, through her nose.
It was the first time I’d heard my mother laugh at something my father said since I was in grade school.
Then she reached down beside her on the swing and picked up the Saturday paper. She had it folded open to the classifieds. She slid it across the swing between them and tapped one ad with her finger.
I went up the steps and looked over their shoulders.
Part-time yard help, Miller Lumber. Forklift experience a plus. 24 hours a week. $14 an hour. Apply in person.
“You drove a forklift thirty-one years,” Mom said.
“My back,” Dad said.
“It says yard help, Dennis. Not lifting core boxes. Pulling lumber orders on a forklift for contractors. Sitting down.” She took a sip of her coffee. “You’ve been sitting down for six years. You can sit down for money.”
Dad looked at the paper. He looked at her.
He didn’t say anything.
But he didn’t hand it back, either.
I carried the Blue Willow into the kitchen and unpacked it into June’s old cabinets, one plate at a time. When I came back out, they were still on the swing.
Not talking. Just swinging a little, the two of them, drinking their coffee and watching the leaves come down.That afternoon, I went out to my truck and got the box that said June.
Mom opened it at the kitchen table.
Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper and set down in an old dishpan so they wouldn’t tip over, were six African violets in little clay pots. Purple ones and pink ones, and one white one with a blue edge around every petal.
I knew that dishpan. It was the one we used to snap green beans in.
“I took them after the funeral,” Mom said. “Nobody else wanted them. Ron was going to throw them out with the old magazines.”
“You’ve had them six years?”
“On my kitchen windowsill at the Meadowbrook.” She shook her head. “That window faces north, Shane. Do you know how hard it is to keep a violet alive in a north window for six years? I talked to them every morning, the way June used to. I felt like a fool.”
She carried them one at a time into the front bedroom. She set them on the windowsill in a row, exactly the way June used to have them. The morning light had moved off the room by then, but you could see just how it would land on them tomorrow.
Dad came and stood in the bedroom doorway. He didn’t come in. He looked at those violets for a long time.
“Those are June’s,” he said.
“They are.”
“You kept June’s violets.”
“Somebody had to.”
He put his hand on the door frame. I saw his jaw working.
Then he turned around and walked out to the garage. We heard him out there for an hour, moving his old foundry boxes around. Neither one of us went out after him.
I won’t tell you any of it was easy.
They’d been married nineteen years and divorced for twenty. They had a long list of reasons why.
The first week, Mom put a list on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a cardinal.
Kitchen after 7 p.m. is hers. Bathroom before 6 a.m. is his. Front room television is hers on Wednesdays for her show. Nobody touches anybody else’s coffee.
