My husband came back from the store with his mother’s beagle in the van, and that dog would NOT stop barking at the pan on my counter.
Craig and I have twelve years and a mortgage in Kittanning, and his family was due at five.
He had offered to go get the ham himself. That was the first odd thing.
“You take the sides, I’ll take the meat,” he said, and pulled the keys off the hook.
Christmas Eve fell on a Wednesday. The store is nine minutes from our door.
He was gone TWO HOURS.
He came in through the garage holding the pan out with both hands, ears red, and it was thirty-one degrees.
“Two stores, and the first one had nothing but spiral-cut.” Then he said his mother had needed a hand with something.
I asked with what.
“Her bins.” He set the pan down and never looked at it again.
His phone went off inside his coat and he read it standing in his boots.
“Her furnace quit and I gotta run back over.”
The door was already shutting.
And he left me the dog.
Sandra is seventy-one and she has NEVER let Roscoe off that porch in eight years.
Now he was in my kitchen going at the cabinet doors. He doesn’t beg; she trained that out of him with a spray bottle.
He wanted the PAN.
He got his feet up on the drawer pulls, slid off, did it again.
“Roscoe, buddy, it’s a HAM,” I said, and he kept right on.
A car alarm went off two streets over.
Eleven minutes on the microwave clock. I got the shears out of the crock and gave in.
The second the paper came apart he went quiet, and that was worse.
I pulled the netting back with two fingers and did not touch it again.
Then I called 911 FROM MY OWN KITCHEN.
The underside of the ham
The paper came apart in two pieces and the ham was face down in the pan.
Somebody had cut a hole in the underside of it about the size of a coffee mug and packed it shut again.
There was a sandwich bag down in the hole, folded over twice.
Sandra’s rings were in the bag. The wedding band and the little garnet one she wears above it, with the loop of clear tape still wound around both bands where she built them up, because her hands went thin after Craig’s dad died.
Her glasses were in there too. The pair on the beaded cord. Folded, both arms in, the way she does it.
And her house keys on the rabbit’s foot that used to be green.
I did not touch it again.
Roscoe sat down on the floor tile and looked up at me and never made another sound. He had been hollering at that pan for eleven minutes and the second I got it open he was done.
The 911 woman asked if anybody was hurt. I said I didn’t know.
She asked where the emergency was and I said my kitchen, and then I heard how that sounded and I gave her Sandra’s address on North Jefferson.
“And who’s at that address right now, ma’am?”
I said my husband. I said he was there two hours ago and he was probably there right now, because of the furnace.
She asked how old Sandra is. Seventy-one. She asked if she had any conditions and I told her the woman can’t see the end of her own arm without those glasses.
Then the hold music came on, a piano thing with bells in it. My oven timer went off for the sides and I shut it up with the shears still in my hand.
She came back on and asked me who else had a key to that house.
The tape on her ring
Sandra brings the ham. That is not something anybody in that family votes on.
Twelve Christmases I have been married into it and twelve times that woman has come through my garage door at four with a roasting pan against her chest, the black speckled one, older than my marriage, and put it in my oven with her coat still on and stood there until it went in the way she wanted it.
She buys it the week before from Snyder’s and keeps it in the second refrigerator on her back porch. She will tell you the porch is colder than the fridge and she is not wrong.
The tape on her rings started three or four years ago. Her hands went thin, the bands went loose, and she would not have them sized because they are the size they are. So she wraps a little clear tape around them and you can see it if you’re close and she does not care that you can.
That is the whole woman right there. She would rather tape it.
Craig’s dad went in 2019, off the plate glass in Ford City, and after that Craig took over her paperwork the way you’d take a heavy bag out of somebody’s hand. He mowed her yard. He drove her over to the eye doctor in Butler. He called her every day at four thirty and if you were in the car with him you heard the whole call, both sides, the volume all the way up.
Everybody in that family will tell you Craig is good to his mother. I told people that. I said it out loud at a graduation party in June with a paper plate in my hand.
Two years ago we put a roof on this house. He said it was a bonus and the rest was a loan through the credit union, and I never asked to see the loan, and that is the part I get to live with.
Last spring he sat at her kitchen table with a folder about her furnace. There was a program for seniors, he said, and there was paperwork. I stayed out in the car with the heat running because I had a headache and because it was easier.
In October he got her a new phone. He said the old one confused her.
After that she stopped answering. It rang and rang, and when I brought it up he said she sleeps in the afternoons now.
I let that be an answer. For two months I let it be an answer.
Roscoe was at my back door with his nose jammed in the crack. That dog had never been in my house in his life.
Nine minutes
Craig’s phone rang out twice. The third time it did not ring at all.
I called Sandra’s landline and got three notes and a recording. Disconnected. Not busy, not out of service, disconnected, and I have been calling that number since before I had a ring on.
I stood at the counter and looked at what the ham came in.
Butcher paper, the waxy kind, and holding it shut was a strip of green painter’s tape. The wide kind. There is a roll of that tape in her junk drawer with a rubber band around it, and it has been in there since her husband did the porch rails.
Our store does not wrap anything in paper. Meat comes out of that case in a plastic tray with a sticker on top, the weight and the price and the little barcode, two seventy-nine a pound this month. There was no sticker on my counter. There was no sticker in my trash, and I went through the trash.
Two hours for a nine-minute store. He came in the house with his ears red at thirty-one degrees, out of a heated van, out of a heated store, and he set that pan down and never looked at it again.
I got my coat.
Roscoe was standing at the door to the garage before I had my arm in the sleeve, and when I opened the car he went up over the seat like he’d done it a thousand times.
He rode in front with his feet on the console. There is a car wash coupon stuck in my cup holder from August that he stood on the entire way.
He sat up straight before the light where you turn. He knew where we were going before I did.
Pauline’s storm door
There was a box truck backed into Sandra’s driveway with the ramp down.
A kid in a hoodie was coming down that ramp with her headboard on his shoulder, the one with the acorn turned into the top of it, walking it down like a ladder.
Craig’s van was not there.
Through her front window the room was bare to the walls. Two hooks up high where the pictures hung. The dent in the carpet where the couch has sat since I have known her. Her tree still in the corner with the lights running off the timer and nothing under it.
I sat in the street a second because my legs would not do it yet.
Pauline Yost came out on her stoop across the road in a coat over her housecoat, arms folded up under it, and waved me over the way you wave at somebody in church.
She said the truck had been there since eleven.
She said Craig came around noon and went in and out maybe six times, and carried out a pan, and put the dog in the van, and he was in a hurry and he was polite about it, the way he is with people who are not us.
I asked if she had seen Sandra.
“Not since yesterday. She waved at me off the porch.” Then she put her hand on my arm and left it there. “Honey, he told me weeks back that you all were making room for her at your place.”
I said that was not happening. I said I had never heard one word about it.
“He said it was your idea. He said you were the one pushing for it.”
The chair by the window
A borough car came up North Jefferson without its lights on and parked square across the end of the driveway so the truck could not move. Bittner. Young, big hands, made me start over twice because I was talking too fast for him to write it.
The front door was unlocked.
It smelled like her house in there. Coffee and Vicks and that pink hand soap she buys by the gallon.
The living room was gone. The dining room was gone. The hall closet stood open with the hangers still on the rod, swinging a little from the door.
She was in the kitchen on a chair by the window with her purse on her lap and her good coat buttoned all the way to her throat.
They had taken the table and left her one chair.
Her face came around at the sound of us and her eyes went past me and came back and settled somewhere near my shoulder.
“Is that you?”
I said it was me.
“Did you open it?”
That is what she asked. Not where is Craig. Not who is that behind you.
I got down on the floor next to the chair, which is not a thing I do, and told her what was in the bag, and she nodded through the whole list like a woman checking off her own handwriting.
Then she said, “Good.”
She cut it herself at eleven that morning. Her own boning knife, at the table that is not there anymore. Took the paper off, went in from the bottom, dug out what she had to dig out and put it down the disposal, set the bag in, folded the paper back the way it came and ran the green tape across it.
“He was out in the yard with the men,” she said. “He come in twice and I was standing at the sink both times.”
I asked her why she didn’t just tell him she wanted to call me.
“He’s had my phone since October.” She said it the way you’d say he has had my ladder since October. “He got me a new one. It don’t have anybody’s numbers in it and I can’t see the little letters, and he fixed it so it don’t ring at night.”
She patted the purse on her lap.
“I put my rings in there and then I took my glasses off and put them in too. You don’t call the law over a ring. Anybody will tell you a ring got misplaced.” She turned her head toward the window. “You call over an old woman’s glasses.”
I asked her how she knew Roscoe would end up in my kitchen.
“I told him that dog would howl the whole way down and howl on your step and he’d have to carry him inside.” Something happened at the corner of her mouth that was almost a smile. “He can’t stand the howling. His daddy couldn’t either.”
I said Craig told me she needed a hand with her bins.
“Bins,” she said. “Well. That’s a word for it.”
Bittner crouched down on her other side and asked her about the papers, and she gave it to him plain. Last spring, the furnace, the folder, sign here Mom, and she signed four times because he was standing over her with his keys out and the kitchen was cold. In November a man came through with a tablet, measuring the rooms, and Craig said that was for the insurance.
She did not know what she had signed until a woman from a title office called the house in December to confirm an appointment.
That was the last week the house phone worked.
Then she said the thing I have not been able to put down since.
“I figured it’d get on somebody’s counter and somebody would open it.” She looked at the shape of me next to the chair. “I didn’t know if it’d be you that stood up.”
Bittner asked her whose house this was.
“Mine till Friday.”
Headlights on the ramp
His van came up the street at twenty of five and he parked in the road because the cruiser had the driveway. He had a gas station coffee in his hand. He walked up with it.
He looked at me, and he looked at the car with the borough seal on the door, and he did not ask me one question. Twelve years. Not how did you get here. Not what is wrong. NOTHING.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Everybody take a breath. Ma, why are you sitting out here in the cold.”
She was in my car by then with the door open and Roscoe standing up on her lap with his feet on the window ledge.
Craig went to Bittner first and his voice changed into the one he uses on the phone with the insurance. “Officer, I’m the son. I have power of attorney, the folder’s in my van, I’ll go get it right now, it’s all legal, it’s all filed.”
“Nobody’s going in the van,” Bittner said.
“It’s my mother’s house and it’s my name on her business. Closing’s Friday. She’s got a room out on Ridge on the twenty-sixth, it’s a good place, I put a deposit down in October. The truck’s today because today is the only day Metzger had. Ask her. Ma, tell them.”
She looked straight out at the street.
The guy from the truck had the headboard back up on the ramp and both hands where everybody could see them. “I move what gets pointed at,” he said, to nobody.
I said one thing. I said, “The ham.”
He stopped. Whatever was coming next went out of him and something else came in behind it.
“What about it.”
“She cut a hole in it and put her rings in it.”
He laughed, and it was not a real one. “She’s confused. Do you hear yourself. Do you hear what you’re standing out here saying in front of a—”
“Her glasses were in it, Craig.”
“She’s got a spare pair in the—” and then his mouth shut, because he knew exactly where they were.
Then he went reasonable again, which is the worst one. “She cannot live here. You’ve seen the stove. She left that burner going in August, the whole house smelled like it. Somebody had to do something and I’m the only one who ever does anything.”
“She put her keys in a sandwich bag,” I said.
That is when he came in close and brought it down quiet, which is what he does when it is real.
“Where do you think the roof came from.”
I said what.
“The roof. The truck. What do you think we knocked off the second mortgage last year, the year you kept telling everybody at work we were finally getting somewhere. Forty-one thousand dollars. Whose do you think that was? Go on. Say it out loud in front of him.”
I did not say anything.
“Four years you’ve been eating off my mother and you never once asked me a goddamn question about where any of it came from, and now you want to stand in her driveway on Christmas Eve with a cop.”
He is right about the not asking. That part is mine and I will keep it.
Bittner told him nothing else came off that truck tonight and everything on it went back in the house, and that no one was getting arrested on his shift over a folder, and that the rest of it was for people who read papers for a living. He wrote a report number on the back of a card and told me to bring him the pan and the wrapping in the morning and not to wash any of it.
Craig said “that’s my mother” about four times. To Bittner. To Metzger. To the street.
I went back in and got her pills off the windowsill and the dog’s bowl out of the cupboard, which was the only thing left in the cupboard.
When I came out he was standing at my passenger window with his hand flat on the roof of my car, talking to her through the glass with the coffee still in his other hand.
She had her purse up against her chest.
“Ma,” he said. “Ma. Look at me.”
She looked out through the windshield at the taillights of the truck.
I got in and started it. My phone was going off in the cup holder. His people were due at my table in twenty minutes.
He was still talking when I backed past the truck. In the headlights I could see his mouth going.
A Sunday in February
Sandra has the back bedroom, the one that used to be his office. Her bed came off that truck and back up her own stairs on the twenty-sixth, and then in January it came here.
The sale did not happen. There is a folder with the county now and a date in April and a woman down there who calls me back, and that is all I am going to say about that part, because it is paper and it is slow and it costs.
He is in Ford City with a guy from the shop. His aunt still sends me pictures of her cat.
Today there was a chicken in Sandra’s speckled pan on my counter, five dollars and change, because neither of us wanted a big thing.
Roscoe got his feet up on the drawer pulls and hollered at it like it owed him money.
Sandra put her hand down flat where he could reach it. She had her glasses on the beaded cord and the tape back on her ring.
“Down,” she said. “It’s a chicken. She’ll open it right in front of you.”
If you know somebody who hasn’t heard their own mother’s voice since fall because a son keeps saying she’s sleeping, tell them to drive over instead of calling. It takes nine minutes.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out My Mother’s First Question About This House Was Whether Cody Could Have a Room, My Sister Was Eight Weeks From Signing the Last Paper on Hazel, and I Took the Money for That Ballroom Out of My Girls’ Account.
