Two weeks later, our relatives gathered for a memorial luncheon. Everyone was talking around the tables as I walked into the room, and I had a coffee can under my arm, and I set it down on the head table and asked if I could say something before the food.
The can has four hundred and some shopping lists in it.
Fifteen years of Thursdays, and I kept every one, and I could not have told you why until my brother said that thing in the pantry.
They are ordinary on the front. Bread, coffee, the good margarine, cat food for a cat that died in 2016 and that she kept writing down for a year because she could not stand the blank line.
The backs are not ordinary.
She wrote on the backs. Not letters, exactly. A sentence or two, in the same pencil, put there for me to find on the drive home and never once mentioned out loud.
March of 2013: Andrea — you look tired. Do not let that man’s mother run your Christmas.
November of 2016: I am forgetting things. Do not tell your brother yet, he will make it a project.
January of 2019, in handwriting that has started to go: Thursday is the only day I set the clock for.
I read four of them out loud at that luncheon and then I stopped, because I could not do any more of them standing up.
My brother is not a bad man. I want that in here. He lives in Nashville and he called her every Sunday for fifteen years without fail and he paid for the roof and the furnace and he never once asked to be thanked for it.
What he could not stand, and what came out of him in that pantry, was that she told me things and not him.
So I told him at that table, in front of everybody, the thing I had worked out on the drive from Paducah.
She did not tell me because I never argued. She told me because I was in the room on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing to do but put cans on a shelf, and a woman who is losing her words will say them to whoever is standing there when she finds them.
He could have had that. It was never a closed door. It was a four-hour drive and a Thursday.
The last list in that can is from the week before she went into the hospital. It says bread, coffee, and then in the middle of the food, in a wobbly hand:
Tell your brother the Thursdays were open to him too. I should have said it. I thought he knew.
She had written it eleven days before she died and I found it three weeks after.
He read it himself, at the table, and then he went out to the parking lot and I let him have twenty minutes.
He has the can now. I made copies of every one and he took the originals, and he calls me on Thursdays, which neither of us planned and neither of us has mentioned.