Tuesdays

By ten, Marsha had made three piles on the dining room table. One to keep, one they would donate, and one for trash. Stacie had ignored all three.

The house smelled the way it always had. Coffee, something sweet she couldn't name, and old furniture that had sat in the same rooms long enough to absorb generations. The same curtains still hung in the front windows. The crocheted afghan Elaine kept draped across the sofa arm remained folded there.

Marsha held up a painting of a piano in a church sanctuary.

"This one should probably go."

Stacie didn’t look up from packing the plates.

"Grandma Elaine loved that one."

"Grandma Elaine bought it at a garage sale for nothing."

"So?"

"So she wasn't attached to it. It was just a painting."

Stacie laughed.

"Those aren't different."

Marsha rested the painting against the table leg. She couldn't remember anyone ever mentioning it. It had simply hung there unremarkably through birthdays, Christmas dinners, and card games. 

Across the room, the cuckoo clock bird emerged and announced the hour.

"That thing never worked right," Marsha said.

"It worked."

"No it didn't."

"It absolutely did."

Marsha opened her mouth, then closed it again.

The clock had hung between the kitchen and the hallway since before Marsha was tall enough to read it. On Saturday mornings, she used to lie on the couch watching the pendulum swing while cartoons played in the next room.

Every few weeks, she'd drag over a chair and adjust the hands again, nudging them forward or back after the clock wandered off on its own. Half the reason it worked at all was because she kept fixing it.

Stacie stared at her for a moment before setting down another plate.

Then she disappeared into the living room.

Marsha waited until a cabinet door opened in the living room before picking up the painting again, and although she searched for some memory of Elaine talking about it, nothing came. 

Instead, she felt the familiar accounting she never seemed able to stop herself from doing whenever she came home. 

The junk drawer beside the refrigerator had once contained a folded sheet of notebook paper covered in her handwriting, and although she couldn't have said what year she'd started it, she could still picture how, somewhere among reminders to buy furnace filters and replace flashlight batteries, she'd written reset cuckoo clock three different times before anyone ever did. 

She set the painting in the donate pile. 

Marsha walked into the living room to Stacie on the couch with a photo album open across her lap.

She sat beside her and reached for the next one.

A few pages later, Stacie stopped.

"I remember when Grandma gave me this."

She turned the album toward Marsha.

In the photograph, Stacie sat on the floor holding a musical jewelry box with the lid thrown open. Marsha looked at the picture.

"Yeah, and Mrs. Brown gave it to me."

Stacie looked over.

"Who?"

"Mrs. Brown. An older lady who lived next door to the school."

Stacie frowned.

"I don't know who that is."

For a second Marsha forgot she wouldn't.

Mrs. Brown had lived close enough that Elaine and Marsha walked there when she was a little girl. She'd given out peppermints from a crystal dish and kept plastic covers on her green furniture for all of Marsha's life.

"She died."

Stacie looked back at the jewelry box.

"I still think Grandma gave it to me."

Marsha kept looking at the picture.

"Was she the lady Grandma used to quilt with?" Stacie asked. "Her and Great Grandma Marjorie?"

Marsha looked over.

"What lady?"

"Mrs. Brown."

Marsha blinked.

"I don't know."

Stacie glanced up from the photograph.

"You don't know?"

The question landed strangely.

Marsha looked back at the picture of the jewelry box.

"No."

Stacie sat with that for a second.

"Grandma used to tell me stories about them."

Marsha waited.

"The ladies Grandma quilted with. I just didn't know their names."

Marsha searched for the memory automatically and came up empty. She didn't know that story.

"I've never heard that before."

Stacie looked surprised.

"Really?"

Marsha nodded.

"Really."

For a moment neither of them spoke.

"She talked about it all the time," Stacie said finally. "We'd go to the fabric store on Tuesdays and she'd tell stories the whole drive."

"What fabric store?"

"Joanne's in Lees Summit. I take her to the city on Tuesdays."

Marsha stared at her.

Mrs. Brown had been dead for years, and somehow she and Elaine had still managed to acquire an entire history Marsha had never heard.

Stacie turned another page.

There was Elaine standing beside a quilt frame Marsha barely recognized. Four women smiled at the camera. One of them had to be Mrs. Brown.

Marsha looked at their faces, waiting for recognition.

Nothing came.

"Which one is she?" Stacie asked.

Marsha leaned closer.

"I don't know."