Barbara Callahan: My Mother's Keeper

Mom met Bill at Gordon’s Garage three months ago, after our car started chugging along like it needed vitamins or something. A tune-up was Bill’s cure, along with new sparkplugs and other things, but he only charged Mother for the tune-up. He asked her out for dinner a few days later and has been coming over ever since. Since then, Mother looks like a beautiful doll that has been taken out of a trunk in the attic and was dusted off and appreciated.

When I got home, I told Grandmother I was sick and went right upstairs to my room and closed the door, but I could still hear her yelling that I was faking because I didn’t want to peel the potatoes for dinner. I wasn’t faking about the sickness. I hurt all the way through to my inside self, the one who makes believe that she is the prettiest and smartest and most popular girl in the class. I told her to go away, that I didn’t want her anymore, that I wanted a new self, a self that had overheard a terrible secret and would know what to do about it.

That night Mother came into my room and asked me what was wrong. I told her that Mary Anne and I had had an argument and she said we weren’t best friends anymore. She lay down beside me on the bed.

“We’re having a mother-daughter bad day,” she sighed. “Bill called me and broke our date for tonight. He said he didn’t feel well, but when I asked him what was wrong, he said goodbye really quick and hung up the phone. Maybe he doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

I wished I could say something that would make her feel better. All I could think of was that she was better off without a murderer, but I couldn’t say that until I had cleared the seal-of-confession problem with Mary Anne.

On Sunday, Mother, Grandmother, and I went to the ten-fifteen Mass. Throughout the liturgy, Mother kept looking around, which made Grandmother knuckle Mother’s thigh and hiss, “Pay attention to the priest and stop looking for that dirty-fingered oaf.” I wanted to knuckle Grandmother’s thigh and for once get the better of her, just to see her jaw drop when I corrected her and said, “It’s not dirty-fingered, it’s bloody -fingered oaf, you stupid woman.”

But I didn’t say it. I was too busy concentrating on the communicants. Since Grandmother always made us sit in the first pew, so all her Bingo friends could see how pious she was, I guess, I could see who came to the altar. If Bill came, I knew that I’d have to jump out of the pew and push him away from the altar. It would be a grievous, unspeakable mortal sin for him to take the Eucharist just so nobody would guess he killed his cousin, but I didn’t see him. After Mass I looked for Bill in the vestibule and so did Mother until Grandmother pulled us both out of the church.

During the day and into the evening Mother kept glancing at the phone as if she could stare it into ringing. As the day trudged by, I watched the prettiness fade from her face. It disappeared completely when Grandmother, who misses nothing said or not said, said goodnight and added triumphantly, “He probably met someone else who doesn’t mind dirty fingernails.”

On Monday morning, Grandmother shoved the weekly newspaper into Mother’s hand and pointed at the front page.

“Read this,” she cackled.

Mother took it from her and read for a minute before crying, “Oh my goodness, no wonder Bill was so different on the phone on Saturday night. He must have just learned that his cousin had died.”

She handed it to me and I saw a big headline that read Local Man Found Dead in Shop.

Below it was a picture of Tim Gordon, proudly standing in front of Gordon’s Garage. He had his arm around his cousin Bill, who was smiling, not like the day he was carrying his terrible sin over to the rectory.

Mother dropped the newspaper onto the table and ran to the hallway to the phone. I knew she was calling Bill even before she said his name.

The article said that on Friday the police found the body of “Tim Gordon, 41, lying on his back partway under a Cadillac up on the lift. The owner of the Cadillac, Jim Holgren, discovered him at six-thirty p.m.”

It talked about Police Chief Kearns, who said there would be an investigation, but “preliminarily I’d say that Gordon slipped on an oil spill near the lift mechanism and hit his head on the concrete floor of the garage.” The rest of the article talked about Tim Gordon’s six-year partnership with his cousin Bill, his wife Helen, and their three children, ten, eight, and six years old. It called them his survivors.

It didn’t say anything about Bill Gordon’s survivor, my mother, who walked slowly into the kitchen and said, “He didn’t want to talk to me. All I wanted was to say I’d help him any way I could.” She looked puzzled and hurt, like someone who had reached for a drowning person and had her arm pushed away.

“It doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t want to talk to you,” said Grandmother. “Probably found someone else to wipe off his tears.”

For once, Mother answered back. “He was too broken up to talk. Not everybody reacts to a tragedy by talking their heads off.”

Before she kissed me goodbye, she flashed a knowing look at Grandmother, who never stopped talking the day Grandfather died, as if she liked telling the tale.

To have the last word, Grandmother yelled, “He probably killed his cousin. I bet you’ll read that in tomorrow’s paper. And his wife, too. She was young when she died five years ago. Fell down the stairs. He probably pushed her.”

“Those are despicable things to say,” Mother said as she walked out the door.

The battery in my brain went dead. It couldn’t handle the picture of Bill pushing a young, faceless woman down the stairs. It couldn’t make my arms move to pick up my lunch bag or my legs to go out the door. It had to wait for Grandmother to shove the bag into my hand and turn me toward the door. On the way to school, it did return to its usual jobs like telling me to wait for a green light and to tie my shoe when it needed it. My brain did these things even though it kept playing a movie of Bill Gordon at the top of some stairs watching a young woman, my mother, fall horribly to the bottom and lie there very, very still.

At school, Sister Therese, the principal, announced over the loudspeaker that she had sad news.

“Children, three students in our school, Madeleine, Augustine, and Lawrence Gordon, lost their father over the weekend in a tragic accident. Please bow your heads and pray for the soul of Tim Gordon and for grace for his family to bear their loss. And as always, we thank the dear Lord for the blessing of this good man’s life.”

We all bowed our heads and joined our hands in prayer, but I had to force myself not to shout out that Mr. Gordon’s death was not a tragic accident, because shouting out in class is forbidden and so is listening to other people’s sins. We were told to be very careful not to listen to other penitents when we were taught about the Sacrament of Penance. But I did pray to thank God that Bill Gordon didn’t seem to want to talk to my mother and that he would stay that way. Maybe Grandmother was right about his wife; she was right about his cousin. I also asked for help in finding out what to do with the terrible secret I’d heard if I was under a seal like a priest.

I didn’t hear an angelic voice telling me what to do but I did get a note that sailed onto my desk. It was from Mary Anne, asking me to walk home from school with her. I folded it up and nodded yes. She was a very good person and planned to go into the convent when she was eighteen, so she could very well be God’s messenger. I thanked Him for His answer because I knew then that it was all right to talk to her about my problem.

The day dragged by until two-fifty, when we again prayed for the Gordon family before dismissal. Mary Anne scooted next to me in line and squeezed my hand. A block away from school, she told me what was on her mind.