Mama called around eleven and said she was coming down. Not asking. Telling, the way she does, and then already off the phone before there was a chance to ask what for.
Nothing was going on. No race, nobody's birthday, no reason for anybody to drive an hour and fifteen minutes on a Monday. Which is what made it strange. She has been coming to this house for six years and every single time there has been a reason stapled to it.
She got here at two with a deck of cards in her cardigan pocket.
Bridge is her game. Has been since before she married Daddy, and she takes it seriously enough that she will tell you flat out you played a hand wrong and then explain why for ten minutes. The problem with bridge is it takes four people. What was on the porch was two. So we played gin, which she considers a game for children, and she beat me at it four hands running while explaining that it was a game for children.
The book came with her. It always does. Paperback, cover creased soft, the spine gone pale from being opened in places nobody wanted to be. She set it on the porch table next to her glasses, opened it once, and never read a word of it.
That is the part that stayed with me.
She has brought a book to everything. Forty-some years of standing in pit stalls she did not want to be in, holding a stopwatch she never learned to read, hands over her ears at the start. Every race Daddy ever ran, she was there, and every one of them she brought something to get her through the parts of it that were not for her. She reads between cautions. She has always read between cautions.
A book in that context is not really about reading. It is a way to be somewhere you did not choose to be. It is how she stayed for forty years without pretending to like it.
So she sat on my porch on a Monday with the pages open to nothing and dealt cards for two hours and talked about her bridge group and a woman in it she cannot stand and Daddy's knee and whether the ridge is turning early this year. Crank moved once, from the boards to a warmer patch of the boards. The coffee went cold and neither one of us got up about it.
She left before supper. Told me she would call. Took the book back out to the car with the same page still showing.
Forty years of bringing something to do while she waited on the rest of us, and it turns out when there is nothing to wait on, she is just good company.