3. Marnie
Marnie
April asks her father to come with her to meet Sherry for the first time. She asks me to join as well, standing in my kitchen holding a mug she isn't drinking from, and I can tell she rehearsed it in the car.
"You could just be there. Not at the table. Like, at another table. I don’t want it to feel like we’re ganging up on her.”
“At the other table, like a hostage negotiator?”
"Mom."
"Like a chaperone at a middle school dance."
"You're being annoying on purpose because you're going to say no."
I set down the dish I'm drying. This is the moment. I've thought about it since Saturday, on and off, in the shower and at stoplights and once at 4 a.m. staring at the ceiling fan doing its wobble.
"I'm going to say no," I tell her.
She deflates about an inch.
"Not because I'm hurt. Listen to me, honey. If I'm sitting there, you'll spend the whole time watching my face."
"I would not."
"You'd check on me every ninety seconds.
You do it at Thanksgiving with Grandma Dee, you did it at your graduation dinner, you've done it since you were six.
" I hand her the towel because she needs something to do with her hands, and she takes it, because she always takes it.
"This one isn't for me. It's yours. Go have it. "
She stands there twisting the towel.
"What if I like her?" she says.
There it is. That's the real question. That's the one she drove over here with.
"Then you like her."
"What if I like her and it hurts you."
"April." I wait until she looks up. "I have been your mom since you were three years old and I realized I loved you. You cannot damage that. You could not damage it on purpose with a hammer."
She laughs, sets the towel on the counter, and we stand in my kitchen for a second while the dishwasher rumbles into its dry cycle.
Then she says, "I'm going to need you to help me pick out something to wear.”
I say, "Obviously," and that's how we handle the biggest bump in our relationship up to that point.
It happens on Friday, they leave at 1:30 for a coffee place in St. Louis Park.
I clean out the pantry. My nerves are shot, and I need to keep busy.
Normally I am not the kind of person who cleans when she is upset.
I'm a person who lets things sit and then handles them all at once on a Sunday.
But at 1:45 I am standing on a step stool with a garbage bag, throwing out lentils from the previous administration, and by 2:30 I have alphabetized the spices, which I have never done, which I do not believe in.
Nathan comes through at some point and stops dead.
"What are you doing."
"Nothing."
"You’re nervous.”
"Get outta here,” I reply, attempting a bad accent to lighting the feeling in my chest.
He gets a Gatorade out of the fridge and leans against the counter and drinks the entire thing while looking at me the way his father looks at code that's compiling wrong.
"You want me to say something dumb so you can laugh?"
"Yes please."
"Okay. I looked it up and technically you can be buried on your own property in Minnesota."
"Nathan."
"You were curious. I could see you were curious."
He gets it from me. Erin gets her whole personality from Keith, which is why the two of them fight in a language nobody else in this house speaks, but Nathan does the thing where he sets a joke down beside you like a glass of water.
They come home after four o’clock.
Nearly three hours. I did that arithmetic without wanting to. Fifty minutes of that was drive time to and from, which leaves two hours in a coffee shop with a woman who has been a ghost story in this family since before either of my other children existed.
April's mascara is gone. Not smudged. Gone, like she scrubbed it off in a bathroom.
"Hi," she says, and then her face crumples and she walks straight into me, and I hold my daughter in the mudroom while she cries into my collarbone in a way she hasn't since she was nineteen and got dumped by a boy named Cody who I still think about with visceral hostility.
"It's okay."
"I don't even know why I'm crying."
"You don't have to know."
Keith stands in the doorway with his keys in his hand. He's been crying too. I've seen this man cry four times in twenty-four years and I can name all of them, and now I have to add a fifth to the list and it happened at a Caribou Coffee.
Later, after April goes home to Drew, we sit on the deck with the citronella candle burning down and the lake noise from three houses over, and he tells me.
Sherry didn't make excuses. That's what he keeps circling. She didn't blame the postpartum, or her mother, or Dale, or the fact that Keith worked eighty-hour weeks and left her alone in a rambler in Brooklyn Park with a colicky baby and no car during the day.
"I gave her about six openings," he says. "I would've taken it. Honestly, Marn, some of it was me. She could've said so."
"What did she say?"
"That she was twenty-four and selfish and scared and she made a choice, and every year after that the door got heavier, and then one day it was too heavy and she just stopped trying to open it."
Which is, and I hate to admit it, a very human thing to say.
"April asked her why she stopped coming back," he says. "She said because she'd see April and April would be fine. She'd be fine and it would prove she wasn't needed."
I turn my glass on the arm of the chair. "Was she crying when she said that?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. So maybe she really means it.”
Keith rubs his hand over his mouth. Then he says it.
"She didn't ask for anything."
The candle pops. Somebody's dog barks at the end of the street.
I hear it three times in a row inside my own head, the way you do when a sentence has a bone in it.
She didn't ask for anything.
Nobody says that unless the possibility has already come up. You don't announce that the house didn't burn down. You don't tell your wife that a woman didn't ask for money unless money was a live thing in that coffee shop, sitting at the table with them, in the middle of the table, in a cup.
"Did you think she would?" I ask.
He doesn't hesitate, and that's almost worse. "I braced for it. Whole drive there."
"And she didn't."
"Not a word." He looks over at me and he's got this expression I recognize from the first year we dated, this loose relieved openness. "She looked at the pictures on April's phone and she just kept saying, look at her. Look at her."
I say something. I don't remember what.
Around eleven, April texts the family thread.
Would it be insane to ask if she could come to dinner?
Erin sends back four exclamation points, because Erin is seventeen and this is the most interesting thing to happen in her life since the IPO.
Keith looks at me across the deck.
I type: Not insane. Sunday?
And that is how I invite Sherry Corbett into my house.
And wonder if I’ve just decided to blow up my own life.