Close to two years of Mondays I drove the widower next door to the drugstore for ONE tube of lipstick, the same red each time. This Monday he buckled in and said cemetery, and then he set a coffee can on my knees that was a whole lot heavier than ONE little tube.
My mother went into that cemetery in 2010.
My father hasn’t been through its gate since the funeral.
Merle Hanneman can walk straight to her row.
I still have to count stones.
Who the red was for, he never said.
I never asked.
The fall of 2024 he took his Oldsmobile through the Pfeiffers’ mailbox.
The state had his license inside a month.
I said I’d drive him.
He wanted the drugstore on Mondays and not one other place.
“The usual,” he’d say, and lay exact change on the counter.
My youngest drummed his sneakers on the back of Merle’s seat the whole ride.
They light up at the heel when they hit something.
Merle let him.
A girl at the register turned the tube over once and read the bottom out loud.
“Hollyhock,” she said.
The last tube my mother ever wore down sits in a sandwich bag in my bathroom drawer.
Most of the church ladies around here past sixty wore that red.
So I didn’t make anything of it.
Early in September the same girl leaned across the counter while he was in the restroom.
“He was buying that color before I EVER worked here,” she said. “Way back when he still drove himself.”
His wife never wore red in her life.
Bonnie was a coral woman.
We buried her on the new side two springs ago.
I set her hair for the viewing myself.
I’ve carried groceries into Merle’s kitchen more times than I can count.
I’ve never seen so much as a lip balm in that house.
Then this Monday.
“Skip the drugstore,” he said. “Cemetery.”
I drove in the gate and took the lane toward the new side.
Toward Bonnie.
“Merle, she’s this way,” I said.
“Wrong side,” he said.
“Back by the fence. Row twelve. Fourth from the gravel.”
I stopped the car dead in the lane and left it running.
Row twelve, fourth from the gravel, is DEBRA.
I don’t need to read the stone.
The can was still on my knees.
I worked the plastic lid off with my thumbnail.
Lipstick.
Packed to the rim.
All of them SEALED.
A strip of masking tape wrapped around each cap, a Monday’s date on it in blue ballpoint.
NINETY-NINE.
Ninety-nine Mondays in my passenger seat.
Bought for a woman SIXTEEN YEARS in the ground.
Merle kept his eyes on the fence.
“The ones from before you, she got,” he said.
“I carried them out here on foot.”
“These, she hasn’t had yet.”
Then he turned and looked right at me.
“Set them on her,” he said. “Each and every one.”
“And after that, you drive over to your father’s and ask him which one of us bought her that red.”
Sandy’s Kitchen
I didn’t set a single tube on her.
I pressed the lid back down with the heel of my hand and drove Merle home.
At the foot of his porch steps he held the can out to me.
“Hang onto it till you’ve asked him,” he said.
I drove across town to the split-level my father shares with Sandy, with the can riding on the passenger seat where Merle had sat.
My father was at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on and a pencil behind his ear.
I set the can down on his placemat.
“Which one of you picked out Mama’s red,” I said.
“Merle did,” he said. “Merle always did.”
He looked at the can a good while after that. He never touched the lid.
Sandy was at the sink with her back to us, rinsing a colander that was already clean.
“Merle has bought her a new tube every week for sixteen years,” I said.
My father took the pencil from behind his ear and laid it down straight beside the placemat.
“I know it,” he said.
“The whole sixteen years,” I said.
“Clear back to the first one.”
Sandy turned the water off.
The clock on the stove turned over to 4:12, and I heard it do it.
I had driven that man ninety-nine Mondays.
I had stood beside him at the register while he counted out dimes.
I had asked my own father, more than once, if Merle seemed all right to him lately.
“He seems fine to me,” my father always said.
“The first what, Pop,” I said.
He took his glasses off and folded them.
“Go home, Tricia. That boy of yours will be off the bus.”
I left the can on his placemat and got as far as my car.
Then I went back in and picked it up off the table.
Merle had handed it to me, not to him.
My father didn’t try to stop me. He watched the can go out the door the same way he’d watched it come in.
Clear back to the first what?
The Sandwich Bag
Mama put her red on in the rearview mirror of the Ford every morning, before the car was even in reverse.
A pass on top, a pass on the bottom, then a press of her lips on the back of whatever envelope was on the dash.
She kept the books at the Co-op for twenty-two years, and she wore it there.
She wore it to church and to the dentist. She wore it to mow.
“A woman ought to have one thing she doesn’t have to think about,” she said once, when I was twelve and asked her why.
The tube rode in the side pocket of her purse.
When one wore down to a slant, there was always a new one in the bathroom drawer with the cap still stiff.
I never once saw her buy one.
I never once asked where they came from.
That was the kind of house we were.
Merle and Bonnie have lived on the other side of the lilac hedge since before I was born.
Merle ran the grain elevator for thirty years, and my father worked the scale under him for most of that.
Merle labels everything he owns with masking tape and a blue ballpoint pen.
The coffee cans of bolts. The fuse box. The deep freeze. Bonnie’s canning jars.
A date on every strip.
He dated a jar of roofing nails once, and I laughed at him over the hedge.
“The nails don’t care,” he said. “I do.”
My father is the other kind of man.
My wedding was in 2006, and he walked me down the aisle in one brown sock and one navy one.
Mama laughed in the front pew until she had to hide her face in the program.
“That man would put a fire engine in the wash with the brown towels,” she said at the reception, and she kissed him on the ear.
She laid his clothes out on the bed every morning of their marriage.
After her, Sandy took it over. I’ve never seen him mismatched since.
Mama died the summer of 2010. She was fifty-three.
The funeral home sent her purse home with us in a clear plastic bag.
I found the tube in the side pocket, worn to a steep slant, the gold cap scratched from her keys.
I put it in a sandwich bag, pressed the air out, and put it in my own bathroom drawer.
My father married Sandy in 2012 and moved across town into her split-level.
He kept the house on Cedar.
When my marriage came apart, he rented it to me.
The rent is six hundred fifty a month, due the first. He cashes the check the day it comes.
So I live in the house I grew up in with Colby, who is five and kicks every seat he sits behind, and I pay my father rent on my mother’s kitchen.
I have opened that bathroom drawer thousands of times.
I have never once opened the bag.
The Thirtieth
Merle’s son called me from Wichita the next morning.
I’d met Gary maybe four times in my life, all of them at funerals or Christmas.
“My father probably didn’t mention it,” he said.
He was bringing a trailer on the thirtieth.
Gary had found Merle a room at a place ten minutes from his own house, with a nurse on every floor and meals in a dining room.
The house next to mine would go up with a realtor the first of the month.
That was twelve days.
“He can’t do his stairs anymore, Tricia. He can’t drive. The man’s been leaning on you for two years, and that isn’t right either.”
I asked him if Merle wanted to go.
Gary was quiet a second.
“Wanting doesn’t have a lot to do with it at eighty-one,” he said.
After we hung up I stood at my kitchen window and looked across the lilacs at Merle’s garage.
The door was up.
He was in a lawn chair in the middle of the concrete, sorting coffee cans into two piles.
I thought about the lid, and how it had come off under my thumbnail like it had been waiting.
My father called that evening.
He doesn’t call. Sandy calls on birthdays and hands him the phone.
“Tell me that can’s still in your car,” he said.
“I haven’t moved it.”
“Well, keep it that way.”
I waited.
“Ninety-nine tubes of lipstick on Debra’s stone, and this whole town drives by slow for a month. Kenzie at the drugstore tells her mother. Her mother tells the circle at church. And every one of them is on my porch asking what Merle Hanneman was to my wife.”
“What was he to her, Pop.”
“A neighbor. A neighbor who ought to leave well enough alone, and so should you.”
“Merle’s leaving the thirtieth.”
“Good,” he said. “Then let him go quiet.”
I didn’t say anything.
I could hear Sandy’s television behind him, a game show, somebody winning a boat.
“And the rent’s still due the first,” he said. “Whatever you think of me today.”
“I’ve never once been late.”
“I know you haven’t.”
A pause.
“We understand each other,” he said.
“We do,” I said.
I stood in my mother’s kitchen and looked at the drawer by the sink where she kept the rubber bands.
“That house would rent easy,” he said again, and hung up.
The Cigar Box
Midweek, after Colby was down, I went over to help Merle pack.
Gary had left a stack of flattened boxes against the garage wall and a roll of clear packing tape that Merle wouldn’t touch.
He sat in the lawn chair with his cane across his knees and told me what went where.
“Bolts go. Gary’ll want the bolts.”
“Those jars were Bonnie’s. Those go to the church sale.”
“The deep freeze stays with the house.”
Each can had its strip. Each strip had its date.
A few went back to the seventies, the tape gone the brown of a paper sack.
On the top shelf over the workbench sat a cigar box with the paper worn off its lid.
It was the only thing in that garage without tape on it.
I brought it down because it was in the way of the next can.
Inside were strips of masking tape, dozens of them, curled like fingernail parings.
Each one had been wrapped around something small and round and peeled off again.
Each one had a date in blue ballpoint. The first was September of 2009. The last was August of 2010.
Under each date, in the same hand, were two words.
from R.
I counted fifty-one of them out on the workbench.
R. is my father.
Under the strips lay a note card folded once, the kind that comes twelve to a box at the drugstore.
I knew the handwriting before I had it open. It was the hand from my lunch sacks.
Merle — I know whose ballpoint this is. He can keep it. Thank you for my red. D.
The lawn chair creaked behind me.
“Bonnie said I should have burned that,” Merle said.
“Mama was in Salina every Monday that year,” I said.
“Treatments. He drove her down and sat out in the lot.”
He turned his cane over in his hands.
“The first week down there she asked him to bring her red. He came over that night and stood on my porch with a ten-dollar bill.”
“He said, Merle, you pick it, you picked it the first time, I’ll come home with something orange.”
“The first time,” I said.
“The spring of ’79. Week before her birthday. He stood in the Rexall twenty minutes, then came and got me off the scale.”
He looked at the card in my hand, not at me.
“So I bought it. Taped it so she’d know which week. Wrote from R. so she’d know it was his.”
“Bonnie drove it down the days I couldn’t get off.”
“She knew,” I said.
“Second week.” He nodded at the card. “She sent the tape home with me in my coat pocket. Said she didn’t want him finding it in her purse.”
I stood in that garage with fifty-one strips of tape in one hand and my mother’s handwriting in the other.
“Merle, why’d you keep buying them after?”
He was quiet so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“He never did tell me to quit,” he said.
My mother knew by the second week, and she let my father have every one after it.
Ron’s Recliner
I drove to Sandy’s the next morning before my standing set at nine.
My father was in his recliner with the television on mute.
Sandy had his clothes for the day laid out on the arm of the couch, brown socks folded on top of brown slacks.
I set the cigar box on his TV tray next to his coffee.
He knew the box. I watched him know it.
He opened it anyway.
“Well,” he said. “So now you’ve seen it.”
He lifted one strip out between two fingers and set it back.
“Fine. I’ll say it. I couldn’t tell your mother’s lipstick from her car keys. Never could. She picked every shirt I own. She picked the paint in the house you’re living in. That kitchen yellow, I never saw it. She told me it was yellow and I said fine.”
“Back in ’79 I stood in that Rexall for twenty minutes and every red on the rack looked like mud. So I went and got Merle. He came back out with it in under two minutes. Under two minutes, Tricia.”
“She put it on in the truck and looked at me like I’d hung the moon. What was I going to do, tell her the neighbor picked it? What’s the harm in it. It was the one thing I ever got right with her, and I didn’t even get that right.”
He set his coffee down.
“Then she was down in Salina with her hair coming out on the pillow, asking me every Monday for her red like it was the one thing holding her up. And I couldn’t walk up to that counter. I couldn’t stand there with those girls and ask for lipstick for my wife while she was like that. I tried. I got as far as the door.”
“So Merle did it. Merle was always better at that part. Everybody in town knew it but her.”
“After the funeral he came over with a casserole Bonnie made, and I told him on the step, you keep her in it. I can’t go out there. And he did. And I let him. And I married Sandy and got on with it, because that’s what a man does.”
He looked at the television.
“And now you want me to go stand in front of a hundred tubes of lipstick with that man’s tape on every one, while the Pfeiffers drive past to see what’s going on.”
I took the note card out of the box and held it out to him.
He read it. He read it again.
His thumb went over the D and stayed there.
“She knew,” he said.
“Second week,” I said.
He looked at the card a long time.
“She never let on. Thirty-one years, she never once let on.”
Sandy was standing in the hall doorway with a dish towel. She didn’t come in.
My father folded the card along its old crease and slid it into his shirt pocket behind his glasses.
“I’m not going out there Monday, Tricia,” he said. “You can think what you want of me.”
I reached over and took the card back out of his pocket.
It had never been his.
Row Twelve
Monday I picked Merle up at nine, same as always.
It was his last one. Gary’s trailer was coming the thirtieth.
Colby rode in back with his sneakers going against Merle’s seat, the heels lighting up red with every kick.
Merle had the can on his knees again.
He had a roll of masking tape in his coat pocket. I could see the shape of it.
“Drugstore,” he said, out of habit.
I drove to the drugstore.
He started to get out and I said, “Stay put,” and went in myself.
Kenzie was at the register. She reached under the counter before I got there.
“Hollyhock?”
“Hollyhock.”
It was seven eighty-nine. I paid it out of my own purse, and she didn’t ask me why.
Inside the cemetery gate I took the lane past the new side, past Bonnie, back to the fence.
Merle couldn’t kneel anymore. He stood by the open car door with his hand on the roof.
Colby and I knelt.
We set the tubes along the top of her stone and then along the base in the grass, tape side up, so the dates faced the sky.
Colby handed them to me one at a time and counted out loud. He made it to twenty-three, lost his place, and started over at one.
Ninety-nine.
Then I took the sandwich bag out of my coat.
I’d put it in there that morning, standing in my bathroom, before I could talk myself out of it.
I opened it.
It smelled like the inside of her purse, like spearmint gum and keys.
Mama’s last tube, worn down to its slant, with the gold cap scratched.
I set it at the end of the row.
A hundred.
It was the only thing I had left that had been on her mouth, and I left it in the grass by the fence where she’d been all along.
Merle didn’t say anything. He held out the roll of tape.
I tore off a strip and wrote the date on it with the ballpoint from my visor, and under the date two words, and I pressed it around the cap of her old tube.
from T.
Then I got back in the driver’s seat and took the new tube out of the drugstore bag.
I tipped the rearview down.
A pass on top. A pass on the bottom.
Then I pressed my lips on the back of the receipt.
Merle watched me do it. Then he looked out at the fence.
“Same red,” he said.
Colby leaned up between the seats.
“Mommy,” he said. “Your mouth is a fire truck.”
I put the car in drive.
Merle had the empty can on his knees, lid and all.
My father’s truck was nowhere on that road, and I didn’t look for it.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose mother had one color she never had to think about.
If you found solace in these words, you might also find comfort in reading about the deadbolt I put in myself that needed a key from both sides, or perhaps my brother watching on the stairs while my father locked me out. We also think you might appreciate the story of how my boy had been walking lunch down to that mailbox since the first snow.
