The deputy said she’d come to the door pleasant and apologetic and told him her daughter worries too much. He said the house was empty, the doors were locked, and everything was in order. Then he said the thing that made me sit down: Ma’am, she asked me three times whether I’d already been out to the yard. He hadn’t. He didn’t know why it mattered. He’d assumed she meant the garbage cans.I drove out Saturday. The yard is where my father built the shed in 1996, and behind the shed, under a tarp and a sheet of plywood, was my mother’s car, and in the car were four suitcases, her sewing machine, the photograph albums, and the good silver. She’d been loading it since Tuesday. She’d used the signal because she couldn’t work out how to say the actual sentence, which was that she had decided to leave and had no intention of telling any of us until she was gone.
She’s seventy-nine. She has a friend in Bisbee she’s known since 1961 and a plan she’s apparently been refining for two years, and what she was frightened of wasn’t an intruder — it was me, and my brother, and the conversation about whether she’s fit to be doing this. She said she’d sooner have had a man in her kitchen than that phone call. She said it without any heat, which was worse.
I helped her finish loading. That’s what I decided in the driveway, standing there with a deputy’s card still in my pocket, and I’m still not entirely sure it was right. She’s been in Arizona since March. She calls on Fridays at four, mountain time, and there’s no trash to put out and she does the conversation anyway. She has never once mentioned the signal, and I’ve never asked, and if I ever hear my father’s name in the middle of a sentence about the weather again I’ll be in the car inside a minute.
