Chapter 3
ERIC
Problem solved. That's what went through my head, standing in my own living room with my mother crying happy tears and my daughter spinning around in a blue dress.
That's the whole thought. Two costumes, two occasions. One formal, one homemade. One a party at my mother's house with forty people and a cousin who brings a real camera, the other a school parade at ten in the morning where the fifth graders walk the track.
Two of a thing, two places to put them. Nineteen years supervising a maintenance crew teaches you to match the resource to the job.
I noticed Jenna go into the kitchen. I noticed she stayed in there longer than coffee takes. I figured she was giving my mother room, which is a thing she does, because Mom takes up a lot of space when she's happy and Jenna's good about letting her have it.
Mom left around one, hugged Lucy twice at the door, and told Jenna the coffee was good, which is the highest praise my mother gives anything she didn't make herself.
Then she backed the Buick down our driveway at four miles an hour the way she always does.
I stood in the door and waved until she was past the mailbox, because if you don't wave she calls later to ask if something's wrong.
When I came back in, the wings were gone off the kitchen table.
Not thrown out — moved. Jenna had carried them into the front room and leaned them against the wall behind the reading chair, points up. The table was cleared right down to the wood and wiped. Cereal boxes back in the pantry. Glue gun coiled up in the box with the fabric scissors.
It looked like a table for the first time since September.
"You cleaned up," I said.
"You wanted to eat dinner on it."
That was all. She wasn't slamming anything. She was slicing an apple with her back mostly to me, her voice completely level, and I remember thinking, okay, something's going on, but it can't be that big or she'd say so.
That's how I've thought for twenty-two years. She has never once been a person who makes you guess.
So I went and watched the second half of the game.
I run maintenance for a plant that makes brake components.
Sixty-one people on my side of the building.
My whole job, every day, is deciding which broken thing gets fixed first with the hours I've got.
You don't fix everything. You never fix everything.
You look at what's down, you look at what it costs to have it down, then you put the crew where the number's biggest.
That's not a bad way to run a shop.
In my head there was a cost sheet. My mother's costume had a number on it — three hundred forty dollars, non-returnable, spent by a widow on a fixed income who throws that whole party herself every year.
Jenna's costume had no number on it.
Not zero. No number. There was no line for it. You can't put a line on a sheet for something your wife does at the kitchen table on a Tuesday because she likes doing it. That's not a cost, that's a Tuesday.
So every October the sheet came out with one number on it, I made the obvious call, and I felt good about making it, because I'm the guy who keeps everybody happy with the hours he's got.
Anyway. I watched the game.
Around four Lucy came down in normal clothes with the crown box under her arm and asked if she could keep it in her room instead of the hall closet.
I said sure. Then she wanted to know whether the wings were staying in the front room, because the tails were touching the floor and she didn't want them to bend.
"Ask your mother."
"I did. She said they're fine there."
"Then they're fine there."
Lucy stayed in the doorway a second longer than the conversation needed. She's eleven. She's at the age where she's started clocking the temperature of a room without having words for it yet, so she just hovers.
"Is Mom mad?"
"No. Why would Mom be mad?"
"I don't know."
"She's not mad."
She went away. On TV somebody fumbled on the twelve. I sat there with the remote in my hand running the tape back to see if I'd said something stupid, and I couldn't find it. I'd said Lucy would wear Grandma's to the party. She could wear Mom's another time.
Another time.
Then the phrase turned on me the way a word will if you look at it too long, and I heard it in my own voice from before.
Last year, in that same room, near the fireplace, with the fox ears in my hand. You can wear these another time, kiddo. Grandma already got you the whole cat setup. Lucy said okay. Jenna said something like it's fine, honey, Grandma's is beautiful. We went to the party and Lucy wore the cat.
I remembered it clearly, and I remembered it as a good memory, because everybody had been fine.
There's a jellyfish back there somewhere too.
Jenna built it out of a clear umbrella with lights inside and about a hundred yards of ribbon.
Lucy went to the party that year as a bumblebee with wings that plugged in and inflated.
I can still hear that little pump humming all night.
Couldn't have told you if it was three years ago or six.
I sat forward with my elbows on my knees.
It wasn't shame, exactly. Closer to a walk-through on a line you've run a thousand times, when a bearing makes a noise it shouldn't make. Five-minute fix or the whole shift, no way to tell from the doorway.
I went to the kitchen. Jenna was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up.
"Hey. You good?"
"I'm fine."
"Because you got quiet."
"I got quiet," she agreed.
"Is it about the dress?"
She shut the water off and stood there with her hands still wet, not turning around, and when she finally spoke it came slow, like she was picking between several versions.
"How many times have you said that to her?"
"Said what?"
"You can wear Mom's another time."
I laughed a little. Not at her. It came out because I hadn't expected the question to be that specific, and my first move when I don't have an answer is to make a noise that buys me a second.
"I don't know, Jen. I don't keep a count."
"I'm asking you to try."
"That's not — " I stopped. "Twice? Three times?"
She dried her hands, hung the towel on the bar, straightened it, and took a long breath in through her nose.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay what?"
"Okay, I heard you."
Then she went past me and up the stairs, not crying, not slamming anything, saying good night to Lucy on the way like a normal person.
I stood in my kitchen next to a clean table. The apple she'd sliced was still on the board with the knife laid across it, going brown at the edges.
Three times. That's the number I'd thrown out, fast, the way you do when you want a conversation to keep moving, while some part of me was already reaching backward through years of Octobers and hitting something solid every single time.
The dragon tail. The astronaut helmet with the visor she cut out of a soda bottle. The fox ears.
I knew there were more, and that was the trouble — I could feel the shape of a pile back there and couldn't lay a single year of it out straight.
I tried anyway. The first one's easy, because Lucy's three in it: there's a picture on my phone of her in a Cinderella dress with frosting on her chin, and I remember the dragon tail going over to Mom's in a bag that never came out of the bag.
After that it goes to mush. There's a robot with a flashlight wired into the side.
There's a year Mom bought the Elsa dress in August, which I only know because she brought it to a cookout.
There's the helmet, which I sanded myself out in the garage.
I know Jenna made all of them. I know what my kid has on in the pictures on my mother's stair wall. I sat there twenty minutes trying to get those two lists to line up, and every time I got close to a year it went soft on me.
Nobody ever fought about any of it. There's never been a bad Halloween in that house.
So I couldn't work out why my stomach was doing what it was doing.
Jenna had asked me a question, I'd answered with a made-up number, she'd said okay, I heard you, and gone upstairs. Twenty seconds.
Anybody else on earth would have kept going. Anybody else would have said three times? Are you kidding me? and hauled the photo albums out right then and put me through it.
She went to bed.
Twenty-two years I've been telling people my wife is the most reasonable woman alive. I've said it at work. I've said it to my sister. I said it once at a wedding, into a microphone.
Standing in that kitchen it stopped sounding like a compliment for a second, and I didn't like where that went, so I quit thinking about it.
I got a beer out of the fridge, didn't open it, put it back. Then I went into the front room where the wings were leaning against the wall and turned the lamp on.
Up close you could see everything Lucy had done wrong and Jenna had let stay wrong.
The veining on the left one wandered. There was a thumbprint of silver near the base where somebody had grabbed it before it dried.
Along one edge the organza had a pucker in it, a gathered spot maybe an inch long where the fabric went in crooked under the wire.
Six weeks of Tuesdays and Thursdays. Six weeks of that table being unusable, of stepping over the ironing board in the hall, of paint water in a jar next to my coffee cup in the morning.
I'd held one of them while it dried. Two nights ago. Stood in my own kitchen and held a wing six or seven minutes so it wouldn't tip, and thought I was being a good guy about it.
I turned the lamp off.
Upstairs the shower ran and quit. I could hear Jenna moving around above me — the closet door, the drawer that sticks. Ordinary sounds. Nothing in that house was wrong.
I couldn't answer her question. That's what I kept hitting on the way up the stairs. She hadn't asked me to defend anything, she'd asked me for a number, and I didn't have one, because I'd never once thought it was worth counting.