“Hello, this is Tasha,” said the young voice on the phone, and when I told her my name and read her the number written on the napkin of the Dairy Queen, she gave a little gasp. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Oh, ma am, it is you. She wrote your name on that napkin in July.
She said you would call when it was time. Please do not hang up. My grandmother is right here.” I held the phone against my ear in the front seat of the car outside the funeral home, with the streetlights coming on, and I heard a rustle, and then a thin and quavering voice said, “Gaylene?”
Her name was Ruth Ann Beasley. She was seventy eight years old, and she lived in a nursing home in Hope, Arkansas, forty minutes from the booth where she had spent sixty one birthdays of mine. She told me, in short breaths between sentences, that she had been seventeen. The father of the baby had gone to Vietnam and had not come back. Her own mother had said she would be sent away, and she had gone to the back of the Dairy Queen with a box and a dish towel in the cold dawn.
I did not say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing, and the soft beep of a machine beside her bed. When I found my voice, I asked her the only question I had. I asked her why she had never spoken to my mother. Ruth Ann was quiet. Then she said, “Because she was your mother, honey. She had earned it. I only wanted to see that you had a mother who loved you. I would sit behind her and listen to her cry, and I knew you were all right.”
There are two kinds of mothers in some stories, the one who gives a child away and the one who holds on, and both of them can break their hearts on the same day.
I drove to Hope the next morning, with Tasha waiting at the front door in her scrubs. She is thirty, a nurse like her grandmother never got to be, and she has my eyes. She took me down a hall with framed pictures of cheerful quilts, and she opened a door, and there in a wheelchair by the window sat a tiny woman in a pink cardigan with a blanket over her knees. She looked up at me and put both hands over her mouth. I knelt beside the chair and she touched my cheek, and she said, “You grew up.”
We talked all afternoon. She told me about the father, whose name was Jimmy Ray, and showed me a photograph that she had kept in her Bible, a thin boy in a uniform, grinning. She told me she had married late and had a daughter, my half sister Cindy, who was gone now, and then Tasha. She told me she had driven to the Dairy Queen that first August because she could not stay away. She had not meant to come back the next year. But she did, and the next, and in time it became her prayer.
I told her about my mother. I told her about Wanda Hopper and the payroll office and the Sunday dinners and the way she sang when she did dishes. I told her that she had followed a sixteen year old girl to the car once and said, “Gaylene, whatever you do in this world, do it kind.” Ruth Ann cried then. She said, “She knew who I was, you know. The last time we were both there, she looked at me in the glass of the window. She nodded. Just once.”
I have thought about that nod ever since. Two women, one holding the melting cone and one holding nothing, each giving the other the only thing she had to give. It is the whole story, I think. It is why my mother drove there every year and why Ruth Ann never turned around. They shared me across a booth for sixty one years, and neither of them ever took a single second more than her share, and neither one ever asked for forgiveness.
On the next ninth of August, at two o clock, I drove Ruth Ann to the Dairy Queen out on the old highway, Tasha pushing the wheelchair through the door. The new manager, a young man with a name tag, had read about us in the local paper, and he had reserved the corner booth with a little sign. We sat on one side together, Ruth Ann and I, and Tasha sat across from us. We ordered three chocolate dipped cones, and for the first time in sixty one years, nobody sat with her back to anyone.
Ruth Ann held hers in a napkin and did not eat it. She looked out the window at the highway, then at me, then at the cone, and she began to laugh softly. “Your mother would be so annoyed,” she said. “It is melting.” I took a bite of mine. It was cold and sweet and a little too hard, exactly as I remembered from childhood. And I said, “She would say, eat it, baby, before it gets away.” And we did, the three of us, together, in the corner booth.