One More Summer
The doctor had called it “the early stage,” and Sam had decided the phrase was built the way a levee is built — not to stop the water, but to buy you a little time to move what you loved to higher ground.
So he had moved his mother to the river.
*
The diagnosis had come the way they come now — in a bright office with a kind young doctor and a clock on the wall — and Sam had gone with her, and it was the going-with-her that undid him, because his mother, being told that her own mind was leaving, had reached over and patted his hand.
That was the thing. The doctor said the words — the tests, the imaging, the long soft clinical sentence with the word in the middle of it — and Sam felt the floor go out from under him; and beside him his eighty-two-year-old mother, hearing that she was going to lose herself by degrees, turned to her grown son and saw that he was the one who needed comforting, and comforted him. Patted his hand. Said, “Now, now. Don’t you take on. People have handled worse than this, and I’ve handled worse than most.” As though the diagnosis were his to bear, and her job, as ever, was to get him through it. More than fifty years of mothering so deep in the grain of her that even the news of her own unmaking couldn’t reach past it to make her think, first, of herself. She thought first of him. She always had. She was going to right up until the machinery that did the thinking finally wore all the way down — and she did, too; it was one of the last things to go, that reflexive turning toward whoever else in the room might be hurting.
He held it together in the office. He fell apart in the parking garage, in the car, before he turned the key — one hard silent minute with his forehead on the wheel while she waited, patient, and then reached over and patted his hand again and said, “There. Better? Good. Now take your mother for a milkshake. I’ve just had a rotten bit of news and I believe I’ve earned one.” And he laughed, a wet wrecked laugh, because she had made a joke, because she was making him laugh in the worst hour, doing the thing, making sure of it; and he took her for a milkshake, and she got two straws so he could share it, and that was the day he understood he was going to give her whatever was left, all of it, whatever it took.
*
It had taken three weeks of arguing with himself and one afternoon of not arguing at all. He had been sitting in her kitchen — the small tidy kitchen of the small tidy apartment where she had lived since the divorce, twenty-six years now — watching her make coffee she would forget to drink, when she turned to him with the afternoon sun coming through the window behind her white hair and said, “Sammy, do you remember the river? Weren’t those the best of times.” It was not a question, and she was not really asking him. She was telling him the last true thing she was still sure of.
He booked the cabin that night.
*
Packing up the apartment to bring her north had been its own small heartbreak, a thing he had not braced for.
She had lived there for twenty-six years — since the divorce, since she took her name back — and it was, he saw now, going through it, the first and only home that had ever been entirely her own. Every wall of it said so. There were no compromises in that apartment, no man’s chair, no room she had ceded — Gene, when he came, had asked for neither; it was small and it was hers and it was arranged exactly to please one person, and she had pleased that person, at last, for twenty-six years. On the walls were the grandchildren’s school pictures in dime-store frames, and a needlepoint that said AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, and a single photograph of a gentle-faced man that made Sam’s throat tighten to see. In the kitchen, everything within reach, everything labeled in her round hand — a whole life organized down to the last drawer by a woman who had finally gotten to decide where things went. He packed it into boxes feeling like a vandal, dismantling the one kingdom she had ever ruled, and he understood, folding her cardigans, wrapping her few good cups, that he was not just moving his mother to the river. He was closing, with his own hands, the chapter of her life in which she had belonged entirely to herself, and he grieved it even as he did it, because he knew she would not be coming back to it, and because it had been, in its quiet way, the reward at the end of a very long road — and now the road was ending too.
He took the needlepoint. He took the photograph of Gene. And he took, folded small in a drawer, another needlepoint, half finished — she had been making a new one, in the good years, and had gotten as far as HOME IS WHERE and then stopped, the rest of it still only pinholes in the canvas, the thread waiting. He did not finish it. He could not have said why. He put it in the box, the unfinished word and the waiting thread, and carried his mother’s whole self-made kingdom down to the truck in cardboard, and locked the door behind them for the last time, and did not tell her, on the drive, that they were not coming back. Some things you carry so the other person doesn’t have to.
*
Now the truck climbed the last grade with the windows down and the smell coming up — pine and warm dust and, underneath it, the green cold breath of the water — and beside him Marlene sat with her purse on her lap and her good shoes on, dressed as if for church, which was how she dressed for anything that mattered.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Up to the river, Mama. For the summer.”
“The river.” She said it the way you say a name you love. Then, a mile later, pleasantly, as though the first time had never happened: “Where are we going?”
“The river, Mama.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “Are the others coming?”
And there it was, the small hook that caught in him every time. Sam kept his eyes on the road. “We’ll see,” he said.
He had packed her suitcase himself, and in the packing had found the true shape of the thing he was up against. Folded neatly among her blouses were a soup colander, a paring knife wrapped in a dish towel, a single child’s leather sandal gone stiff with age, and her hymnal — the burgundy one, its spine held together with a rubber band. He had stood in her bedroom holding that little sandal and had not been able to breathe right for a minute. He did not know whose foot it had once fit. He suspected she no longer did either, and that she had packed it anyway because some deeper part of her, below the part that was leaving, still knew it was precious and would not put it down.
That was the thing nobody warned you about. The disease took the calendar and the car keys and your own son’s name. But the love it could not seem to reach. The love was kept somewhere lower, in the oldest cellar of her, and it went on running the way the river ran — whether or not she could tell you what year it was.
*
The cabin was the same, and smaller, the way all returned-to places are. Same plank porch, same three cane chairs and a fourth that did not match, same screen door that clapped shut behind you like a little burst of applause. Marlene stood in the middle of the main room and turned a slow circle, and Sam watched her face to see whether she knew it.
She knew it.
“Well,” she said softly, to the room, to the river beyond it. “You waited for us.”
She went straight to work. That was the other thing that had not gone: she could not be inside a house without readying it for people. She ran a cloth over a table that did not need it. She counted the chairs and frowned. She opened the cupboard and took stock of the plates — “Six,” she announced, satisfied, “that’s enough if the little ones share” — and Sam did not tell her that there were no little ones anymore, that the little ones were grown and going gray and, some of them, not speaking to him.
Then she began to sing. Just under her breath, laying out the forks. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide. Every word, in order, in the true old tune — a woman who could not reliably find the bathroom calling up a hymn from another century without a single stumble, because she had sung it ten thousand times over ten thousand troubles, and it had worn a groove in her too deep for the disease to fill.
“Ray,” she said, without looking up, “hand me that dishrag.”
Sam’s throat closed. His father had been gone eleven years. He crossed the room and put the dishrag in her hand.
She felt the wrongness of it before she understood it — he watched the flicker cross her face — and then she looked up at him, and her eyes cleared for one bright, terrible second, and she laughed. “Would you listen to me,” she said. “Calling you your daddy. You’re twice the man he ever was, Sammy, and don’t you let me forget it.” Then the cloud slid back over the moon of her face, gentle as anything, and she went on setting the table for people who were not coming.
It was the bravest thing he had ever seen — that laugh, thrown up like a hand against the dark. He had to go stand on the porch a while.
*
Out there, he made himself do the thing he had been avoiding. He took out his phone and typed to his sister: We’re up at the river for the summer. She’s asking for everyone. He looked at it a long time, then added one word — Come — and deleted the please he wanted to put after it, because he knew Diane, and knew the surest way to keep her away was to sound like he needed her there. He sent it. He hated how much he wanted her to answer.
She did not. Not that night.
The rift was two years old and, like most family wounds, had built a second story onto itself since the day it was framed. It had started with money, the way these things so often do. When the old family home was sold, the proceeds — and most of what Mama had saved over a lifetime — simply vanished, moved by Marcus, Diane’s husband, into accounts Sam could not see. Marcus had taken over Mama’s affairs when her memory first began to slip, quietly, because someone had to and Sam was two time zones away then; but the day Sam found the emptied accounts, he did not see a son-in-law who had stepped up. He saw a man helping himself to a woman who could no longer count what she had. He had accused Marcus of robbing his own mother-in-law, and sworn he would drag him before a judge and have every last dollar accounted for. Marcus had told him, cold, that he had no standing, no power of attorney, and no idea what he was talking about — and that he might have caught it sooner had he ever once gotten on a plane to help. Sam had said a sentence back, one he could not now unsay. Diane had chosen her husband, the way wives do. The phone had gone quiet, and two Christmases had passed with the quiet still lying on it. Their mother had noticed, in her fading way. She asked after “the others” the way your tongue keeps finding a missing tooth — not remembering the loss, only the shape of the gap it left.
Inside, the singing had stopped. Sam went back in and found her at the open closet, both hands working through a stack of folded quilts, her face knotted with a purpose he did not recognize.
“What are you looking for, Mama?”
“The tin,” she said, as if he were slow. “I have to find the tin before they come. It has to be all ready.” She turned to him, and real distress was rising in her now, the flat panic that came when the world stopped making sense. “Sammy. Where’s my tin?”
“What tin, Mama? What’s in it?”
But that door had already swung shut. She stood with her empty hands open and stared down at them as though they had betrayed her. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “But it’s the most important thing. Why can’t I —” and her voice broke, and Sam crossed the room and held her, this small, hard-working woman who had held all of them her whole life, and felt how light she had gone.
“We’ll find it,” he said into her white hair. “I promise. We’ll find the tin.”
*
The first night was the hardest and the sweetest, the way first nights are.
He got her settled into the little back bedroom that had been, once, the room the children slept in head to foot, and he found her nightgown and her hairbrush and the burgundy hymnal, and he sat on the edge of the bed while she said her prayers, which she still had, whole and unbroken, the way she had the hymn. She prayed for her children by name — all of them, the ones who spoke to each other and the ones who didn’t — and she prayed for Gene as though he were only away on a trip, and she prayed, at the end, the way she had every night of her life, a line Sam had forgotten he knew until he heard it and it went through him like a key in an old lock: Lord, keep what I can’t hold, and hold what I can’t keep. He did not know where she had gotten it. He suspected the Auntie. He would find himself saying it, years later, over his own sleeping grandchildren, and not remember for a moment where it had come from, and then remember, and have to stop.
When she was down he did not leave right away. He sat in the dark of the old children’s room and listened to the river and to his mother’s breathing and let himself feel, just for a while, the enormous strange grief of it — that he was here to take care of her in the room where she had taken care of him, that the wheel had come all the way around, that this was both the natural order of things and the most unnatural thing in the world. Outside, the same river. On the wall, a water-stain shaped like a rabbit that he suddenly, violently remembered being four years old and afraid of — and remembered her sitting on this same bed telling him it was a friendly rabbit, a guard rabbit, that it stayed awake all night so he didn’t have to. The rabbit was still there. She was the one who couldn’t stay awake now. He would be the guard rabbit. It was the least he could do, and for a while it felt like the only thing he had ever been for.
*
Later, when she was asleep, he finished unpacking her suitcase, and at the very bottom, under the hymnal, wrapped in a pillowcase, he found a photograph in a dime-store frame. He had never seen it, or he had forgotten it too. It was this river. This dock. Forty-some years ago. His mother, young and sunburned and laughing with her head thrown back. His father, for once, with his arm actually around her. And in front of them, squinting into the sun with wet hair and gap teeth, all of them still small, still whole, still speaking — Sam, and his sister Diane, their arms slung around each other the way children are before the world teaches them otherwise.
On the porch, alone, a grown man sat holding a picture of the last time his family had been happy in the same place at the same time, and he understood two things at once.
He understood why his mother had to find that tin.
And he understood that he was going to have to bring them all back to this river — every last one of them, whatever it cost him — because his mother had decided, in the one part of her the disease could not reach, that this family was going to be whole again before she went.
She had simply forgotten to tell them.
So he would have to.
