Chapter 7
ERIC
Iwent over Tuesday on my lunch, because if I'd gone in the evening she'd have made a dinner out of it, and I didn't want a dinner.
I grew up in that house. My room was the back bedroom, the one that's the coat room now, and there's a mark on the door frame at about four feet where my father measured us. She's painted around it twice.
The thing about my mother is that she has never once in her life been cheap with anybody.
When Dad was on disability in the nineties she was still sending birthday money to nieces.
There were years I know for a fact she was choosing between things, and I never knew it at the time, because what came out of the front of that house was always a full table.
You don't argue with a woman like that about a bag from the mall. That's what I'd been telling myself for eleven miles.
She had the door open before I was out of the truck.
"Well, this is a surprise."
"I've got forty minutes."
"You've got time for coffee."
The house already smelled like coffee, because it always does, and like the cinnamon plug-in in the hallway.
She had the party going in the dining room — two boxes of orange tablecloths, a tub of the plastic spider rings she buys every year and never runs out of, a stack of paper plates with pumpkins on them still in the shrink wrap on the sideboard.
She's seventy-six and she does all of it herself. Forty-some people, the garage, the tables, the cider. She won't let anybody set up before noon on the day, because she likes to work through it in her own order.
The tablecloths were already out of the box, folded over the back of a dining room chair, all four of them creased from sitting since last November. She takes them out on the twenty-ninth every year to let the creases drop.
"Those are going to want an iron."
"They always want an iron."
"I'll do them Wednesday morning."
"I'll do them Wednesday morning." She was tipping the spider rings off the sideboard into their tub. "You do the corners wrong. Sit down. You want a sandwich?"
"Coffee's good."
"You haven't eaten."
"I've eaten."
"You've had coffee and something out of a machine."
She put it in front of me in the mug with the chipped handle, the one she always gives me because I'm the one who chipped it, and sat down across the corner.
"Now. Did she try on the shoes? I sent a picture. Half size up from what Jenna told me, because you know how a dress shoe runs."
"Ma."
"They'll be here tomorrow."
"Ma, I need to talk to you about the costume."
Her hand went still on the cup for about a second.
"What about it."
"Lucy and Jenna have been building a costume since September. A moth." I put my arms out to show her the span. "It's basically done."
"I know that, honey. I've seen it in the kitchen."
"You've seen it in the kitchen."
"It's very clever. Jenna's always been clever with her hands." She got up and moved a dish towel from one hook to another, which is what she does instead of sitting still. "She can wear it to the school thing. Don't they do the parade on the track? Karen's kids do the parade."
"They do a parade."
"There you go."
"Mom."
"That's what I'm saying, Eric. There's more than one day." She said it warmly. She wasn't fighting me, she was being nice. "Halloween's a whole week these days. The school thing, the trunk-or-treat at the church, the party. Nobody has to lose anything."
I turned the mug around on the table. "The party's the one with pictures."
"Well, that's why she should look nice for it."
There it was, right out in the open, without a scrap of malice in it — a woman stating what she took to be a neutral fact.
She went back to the sideboard and came around with the spiral notebook she keeps the party in. She's kept it since the nineties, two pages a year: headcount, what she made, who brought what, what ran out.
"Forty-three this year." She turned it so I could see her handwriting. "Forty-three, if Doreen's daughter comes. Last year was thirty-nine."
"That's a lot of cider."
"It's two roasters of cider." She keeps those in the crawl space and makes me get them down every year, and she hadn't asked me yet, which meant a phone call Wednesday. She tapped the page. "I've got the girls' pictures back here. I write down what everybody wore."
She flipped back four or five pages and there it was in blue pen. Lucy — cat, ears + tail, so cute. Under it, Ry — dinosaur. Maddie — Wednesday.
She'd written it down. Every year, in her own hand, a list of what my daughter wore to her party.
"That dress cost three hundred and forty dollars," she said, closing the notebook, "and it's non-returnable, because it's a costume, and they don't take costumes back after the twentieth. I asked. I asked at the counter, Eric, because I'm not stupid with money."
"I know you're not."
"And she loved it. You saw her. She had it on two hours."
"She did."
"So." Mom sat back down with her chin slightly up and her hands folded. "I don't understand what the conversation is."
For about ten seconds I agreed with her.
Not out of weakness — out of arithmetic.
Three hundred forty dollars against a costume that had already gotten six weeks of use out of the making of it.
A kid who liked both. A party that comes once a year.
My mother at seventy-six, who's been throwing it since before I could drive, who was going to stand at that door on Wednesday night wanting to watch her granddaughter come through it looking like something.
That's a completely reasonable set of considerations, and I've been running my life on it for years.
I could feel my shoulders coming down. That's how it goes — the fight stops, everybody at the table is happy, and I'm the one who made it work.
I've had that feeling my whole life in this kitchen.
I got it at nine, wearing a jacket I hated to a wedding.
I got it at seventeen, letting her pick which colleges we'd drive to.
I got it at forty-six, carrying a recliner up the basement stairs.
Then I heard Jenna's voice in my own kitchen. Her receipt is a commitment and my six weeks is a hobby.
"Can I ask you something."
"You can ask me anything."
"Why do you always buy it in October?"
Mom blinked at me. "Because Halloween is in October."
"No, I mean — " I set the mug down. "Every single year, you buy Lucy a costume somewhere between the middle and the end of the month. After Jenna and Lucy have already started theirs. Never in August. Never in September."
"I don't shop for costumes in August. Nobody has them out in August."
"Okay. So September."
"Eric, I don't plan it out like a — I go to the mall, I see something, I think, that's Lucy." Her voice came up. "Am I supposed to make an appointment?"
"You could ask."
"Ask what?"
"Ask if there's a plan for the thirty-first. That's all. One phone call in September. Hey, what are you two doing this year."
"And if she says they're doing something?"
"Then you know."
"Then I can't buy it."
"Then you buy it for Christmas."
"It's a Halloween costume, Eric."
"Then you buy it next October, in September, after you've asked."
"They always have a plan," she said. "There's always a project on that table. If I waited for there to be no project on that table, I'd never buy the child anything."
She stopped.
I don't think she heard herself. Her face didn't change at all. She reached over and straightened the shrink-wrapped plates and started in on how Karen was bringing the cider this year, because last year's was too sweet.
But I heard it.
If I waited for there to be no project on that table, I'd never buy her anything.
There's always a plan already underway. She knows that. She buys anyway, it goes on top, and she's never once had to call that a decision. She wasn't cheating anybody. Nobody had ever told her there was a rule.
"Ma, has Jenna ever asked you for anything?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"A real one. In twenty-two years. Has she ever asked you for one thing."
Mom stopped and actually thought about it, which I'll give her credit for.
"She asked me for my pot roast. Years ago."
"That's it?"
"She's not a person who asks."
"No," I said. "She isn't."
"That's a good quality."
"It is." She wiped a spot on the table where nothing was. I turned the mug around one more time. "It's also why she's the one who always ends up short."
She didn't have anything for that. She got up and checked the cider that didn't need checking, lifted the lid, put it back, turned the burner down a notch it didn't need.
"I'm going to think about it," I said.
"Think about what? Honey, the girl has a dress."
"I know she does."
"You're being strange."
"Probably."
I finished the coffee standing up. At the door she straightened my collar, the way she has since I was nine, and asked whether Jenna was bringing the corn dish. I said yes, because Jenna always brings the corn dish. Mom said good, because Karen's is soupy.
I got in the truck and sat there a minute with the key not turned, looking at that cardboard cat and its dead spring.
She never has to argue with anybody. She walks into a room carrying a receipt, the money lands on the table, and everything soft that was already there gets moved to make space for it. Six weeks of a kitchen table. Two hundred dollars of organza and ninety hours.
It works because there's a guy in the room whose whole job since he was nine has been keeping her from being disappointed.
That guy's me.
I turned the key. I was eleven minutes late back to the floor, Ramirez covered for me, and I didn't hear a word anybody said to me the rest of the shift.