Chapter 18 #2
“It’s eight feet tall,” I said. “I see it from the kitchen window. It’s in the back corner of the yard, where it gets the morning light.”
She let the water out of the sink and smiled at me.
“There was a card,” I said, “with the tree. It’s in Hungarian, and I can’t read Hungarian. I asked him what it said. He told me for your house, but it’s more words than that. I’ve wondered for three years what the rest is.”
She looked at me.
“It doesn’t say for your house,“ she said. “He gave you the small part because he didn’t want to give you the big one. That’s him.
That’s my son.” She wiped an eye with the back of her wrist. “It says plant the tree, so it puts down roots. And then, for my son, that he will have a home.” Her voice broke.
“Nothing about a house. A home. I sent it because I was afraid he didn’t have one.
I thought he was alone in an apartment, so I sent something of mine to be there with him, putting down roots, even if he didn’t. ”
I stood there with the dish towel in my hand.
“And you planted it in the ground.” She was crying now, openly. “You couldn’t read it, and you didn’t know what it said. You planted it like you knew anyway.”
“I knew it mattered to him,” I said. “That was enough.”
She hugged me. I kept the dish towel out to the side so I wouldn’t drip on her and put my other arm around her shoulders. Over the top of her head, I saw Varga in the hall.
He’d come looking for me. He leaned on the doorframe and let his mother hold the man who’d planted the tree, and he wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “Mom, you’re going to soak him,” he said. “That’s his favorite shirt.” She laughed into my chest and let go.
Later, we all went down to the lake.
Varga’s father had floodlights rigged on the dock. His sister wanted to walk the dog before bedtime, and we all went with them.
The floodlights cast our long shadows across the snow. Medve ran wide loops around us. Varga’s sister held him by the arm, telling him something with her whole body. His father stood off to the side with his hands in his pockets.
I thought about Maine.
My people weren’t loud. My mother wouldn’t put a bowl in someone’s hands before we sat down.
She’d wait, watch, and then decide. Sometime on the second day, she’d set out an extra mug without a word.
My father would shake Varga’s hand and offer four words about the tide.
They still didn’t know about him. I told myself they were older, and it would be hard for them to sit with it.
Standing out on the ice, Varga turned and looked back at me. When I reached him, he hugged me tight, but we didn’t kiss. “Saving it,” he said, “for the real ice.”
Later, in the big room at the end of the hall, Varga shut the door, turned a slow circle, and said, “She’s been in here.”
She had. The bed was turned down on both sides. A space heater ticked in the corner. There were eight pillows on the bed, and on each nightstand was a glass of water.
Varga picked up a framed photo from the dresser and started laughing.
“No. No. She found this one.” He turned it toward me.
It was a kid, maybe eight, with a gap in his teeth wide enough to shoot a puck through, drowning in a game jersey three sizes too big, and sneering at the camera. “I told her to burn these.”
“You were a serious child.”
“I was furious. All the time. Look at my face. That’s a boy with grievances.
” He set it back and squared it to the bed the way she’d had it.
“She does this. My aunt comes, and Mom puts her wedding pictures all over the place. The priest came once, and she put out a photo of my christening—forty pounds of screaming rage. He loved it.”
He kept moving, picking things up and putting them down. “Six towels for two people. We’re here for one night.” He lifted the lid off a little dish and held it out to me. “Now, this is good. These are excellent, the ones she hides from my father.”
He set the dish down and picked up a paperback book, laughing. “And this: she left me a book in Hungarian, and she thinks—“ He paused. “She thinks I have nothing to read at home in my language. She’s not wrong. I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I want to.”
“We’re going to Maine,” I said. “Before Christmas. I’m telling my parents.”
Varga froze. “You’re telling them?”
“I’m telling them, and then you’re meeting them.”
He sat down next to me on the bed. He didn’t say anything for a second. Then it came out of him all at once, pitched low so the house wouldn’t hear.
“Okay. Okay. The ocean—I want to see the ocean in winter. Do they let you on the beach in winter, or is that a summer thing? I don’t know how Maine works.
And the rink. I want to see the rink where you learned, the actual six-in-the-morning one.
Then there’s the harbor and the chowder—for five years I’ve heard about this chowder and never once been allowed near it. That ends now.”
I let him run. Maine would not be the same as Minnesota.
My mother would not push a bowl at him in the doorway.
She would set a place and slowly grow to love him, without ever announcing it.
I knew the house I was bringing him into.
I hadn’t worked out yet how to tell him that the welcome there would be quieter.
I took out my phone and typed a message to my sister.
Rook: Coming home before Christmas. Bringing someone. I’ll call Ma myself—don’t you do it.
Varga read it over my shoulder. “Someone,” he said.
“That’s what she gets for the next three weeks.”
“Someone.” He lay back across the bed and grinned at the ceiling. “She is going to lose her mind.”