just like your ex

I heard their talk as a drone of grown-up chatter, but one time, when my mother was coming across the yard with a big armload of wood, I saw Hazel drop her head in her hands and cry. “When I lived at home, ” she said, “I could carry a load like that. Why, I could carry a bushel of peaches on one hip and a baby on the other without hardly trying. But now it’s all gone, gone with the wind.” Hazel was born and raised over in Jessamine County, Kentucky, just down the road. To hear her talk, though, it might have been hundreds of miles away. She couldn’t drive, nor could Janie or Sam, so her old house was as lost to her as if it lay across the Great Divide. She had come here to live with Sam when he had a heart attack on Christmas Eve. She loved Christmas—all the folks coming by, cooking a big dinner—but she dropped everything that Christmas, locked her door, and came to live with her son and look after him. She hadn’t been back home since, but you could see that her heart ached for the place—she would get a faraway look in her eyes when she spoke of it. My mother understood this, the longing for home. She was a northern girl, born in the shadow of the Adirondacks. She had lived lots of places for graduate school and research, but always thought she’d go back home. I remember the fall she cried for missing the blaze of red maple. She was transplanted to Kentucky by dint of a good job and my father’s career, but I know she missed her own folks and the woods of home. The taste of exile was as much in her mouth as it was in Hazel’s. As Hazel grew older, she got sadder and would talk more and more about the old times, the things she would never see again: how tall and handsome her husband, Rowley, had been, how beautiful her gardens were. My mother once offered to take her back to see her old place, but she shook her head. “That’s mighty nice of you, but I couldn’t be beholden like that. Anyway, it’s gone with the wind, ” she would say, “all gone.” But one fall afternoon when the light was long and gold, she phoned up. “Now, honey, I know yer hands and heart are full, but if there was any way you could see fit to drive me back to the old place, I’d be right thankful. I need to see to that roof before the snow flies.” My mother and I picked her up and drove up the Nicholasville Road toward the river. It’s all four-lane now, with a big span across the Kentucky River, so high you hardly know it’s flowing, muddy, below you. At the old distillery, boarded up and empty now, we left the highway and drove down a little dirt road that angles back away from the river. Hazel began to cry in the backseat the minute we made the turn. “Oh, my dear old road, ” she cried, and I patted her hand. I knew what to do, for I’d seen my mother cry just like this when she took me past the house where she had grown up. Hazel directed Mama past the ramshackle little houses, a few stove-in trailers, and remnants of barns. We stopped before a grassy swale under a thick grove of black locust trees. “Here it is, ” she said, “my home sweet home.” She talked like that, like it was right out of a book. Before us was an old schoolhouse with long chapel windows set all around and two doors at the front, one for boys and one for girls. It was silvery gray with just a few swipes of whitewash blurred across the clapboard. Hazel was eager to get out and I had to hurry to get her walker to her before she stumbled in the tall grass. Pointing all the way at the spring house, the old chicken coop, she led Mama and me to the side door and up onto the porch. She fumbled in her big purse for the keys, but her hands were shaking so badly she asked me if I would unlock the door. I opened the tattered old screen door and the key slid easily into the padlock. I held the door back for her and she clumped inside and stopped. Just stopped and looked. It was quiet as a church. The air was cold inside and flowed out past me into the warm November afternoon. I started to go in, but my mother’s hand on my arm stopped me. “Just let her be, ” her look said. The room before us was like a picture book about the olden days. A big old woodstove sat along the back wall, cast iron frying pans hung alongside. Dishtowels were neatly hung on dowels over the dry sink, and once-white curtains framed the view of the grove outside. The ceilings were high, as befits an old schoolhouse, and festooned with garlands of tinsel, blue and silver, flickering in the breeze from the open door. Christmas cards outlined the doorframes, fixed with yellowing tape. The whole kitchen was decked out for Christmas, an oilcloth of a holiday print covered the table and plastic poinsettias swathed in cobwebs sat in jam jars as a centerpiece. The table was set for six places and there was still food on the plates, the chairs pushed back just as they were when dinner had been interrupted by the call from the hospital. “What a sight, ” she said. “Let’s put this all to rights.” Suddenly Hazel became as businesslike as if she’d just walked into her house after supper and found it below her housewifely standards. She set her walker aside and began gathering up the dishes from the long kitchen table and carrying them over to the sink. My mother tried to slow her down by asking for a tour of the place and saying we could get to tidying another time. Hazel took us into the parlor, where the skeleton of a Christmas tree stood with a pile of needles on the floor below. The ornaments hung like orphans on the bare branches. There was a little red drum and silver plastic birds with paint worn off and stubs where their tails should be. It had been a cozy room; there were rocking chairs and a couch, a little spindleleg table and gas lamps. An old oak sideboard held a china pitcher and basin painted with roses. A hand-embroidered scarf, crossstitched in pink and blue, ran the length of the sideboard. “My goodness, ” she said, wiping the corner of her housedress over the thick layer of dust. “I’ve got to get after my dustin’ in here.” While she and Mama looked at the pretty dishes in the sideboard, I wandered off to explore. I pushed one door open to a big unmade bed heaped with blankets thrown back. Beside it was what looked like a potty chair, only grown-up size. It didn’t smell very good in there and I quickly retreated, not wanting to be caught snooping around. Another door gave way to a bedroom with a beautiful patchwork quilt and more tinsel garlands draped over the mirror above the dresser where a hurricane lamp sat, all caked in soot. Hazel leaned on my mother’s arm as we circled around the