Chapter 9
ERIC
Itook the morning off, told Ramirez it was a family thing, which was true in a way I didn't expand on, and I was in my mother's driveway at eight forty.
She was already dressed — the orange sweater with the pumpkin buttons, the legal pad out on the counter with her list on it, the cider started in the big pot so the whole house smelled like cloves at eight in the morning.
"Twice in one week," she said. "Somebody's dying."
"Nobody's dying."
"Then you want something."
"I don't want anything."
"Everybody wants something at eight forty in the morning. Sit down, I've got the coffee going."
I didn't sit down. I stood at the end of the counter with my hands on the back of the chair, having been awake from two to four running versions of this and hating every one of them.
In one of them I brought the photographs, which Jenna had offered and I'd turned down, because I wasn't going to walk into my mother's kitchen and put evidence on her counter.
In one of them I opened with a compliment, the way you do at work when you're about to take somebody's crew away.
In one of them I made it about Lucy's feelings, which would have been a lie, because Lucy's feelings were the one thing in the whole mess that were completely fine.
The trouble with all twenty versions was that every one of them was built to keep her from being upset, and that was the entire problem.
She had her back to me at the stove, moving the spoon around in the cider for no reason I could see.
So I just said it.
"Lucy's wearing the moth tonight."
Mom set the spoon down. "The what?"
"The costume she made with Jenna. The moon moth. That's what she's wearing to the party."
The kitchen went very quiet. The cider ticked in the pot.
"Eric."
"The dress is beautiful, Ma. Nobody's saying it isn't. And she can wear it — to the church thing, for pictures at Christmas, in her room every day for a year for all I care. It's hers. You gave it to her, it's hers."
"You're telling me she's not wearing it here."
"She's not wearing it here."
"Have you told her that? Because she told me on the phone Sunday she'd wear it."
"I know she did. You asked her a question she couldn't say no to."
"I asked my granddaughter if she'd wear a dress I bought her."
"Ma, she's eleven, she was on the phone with you, and she loves you." I kept my voice down. "There was one answer available to her. You didn't do it on purpose. But there was one answer."
"On Halloween."
"On Halloween. Ma, she finished it Tuesday night. She was walking up and down our hall in it at nine o'clock."
"I don't want to hear about it."
"That's fair."
She went to the sink and ran the water on nothing, then shut it off. She came back and put her hand flat on the legal pad, the way you hold paper down in a wind. Then she picked the spoon up again and set it somewhere else.
"I spent three hundred and forty dollars."
There it was, right on the mark. The same sentence that's ended this conversation every year since the first one, and it landed on me the way it always lands — that drop in the gut, that reflex to fix her face.
"I know you did."
"It's not returnable. I told you that. I asked at the counter."
"I know."
"The girl at the register wrote it on the slip for me. It's in my purse."
"Then what do you want me to do with it, Eric? Hang it in my closet?"
"That was your choice," I said.
She looked at me like I'd switched languages. "What?"
"The three hundred and forty dollars. That was your choice.
" My voice didn't do what I wanted it to do; it came out flatter than I meant.
"Nobody asked you to buy it. Nobody knew you were buying it.
You saw it in a window on a Wednesday, you bought it on your own, and then you brought it to my house on Saturday.
That's your choice start to finish, and it's a generous one. But it's yours."
"I bought it for my granddaughter."
"You did."
"And now I'm being punished for it."
"You're not being punished."
"It certainly feels like — "
"Ma." I put my hand flat on the counter. "Jenna and Lucy spent six weeks on that costume. Six weeks, two and three nights a week at that table. Jenna was up past midnight four times that I know about, because I went down and told her to come to bed. That's eighty, ninety hours of her life."
"That's her hobby."
"That's her time. You spent money you can't get back. She spent time she can't get back. I've been treating those two things like one of them's real and one of them's a craft project, and I've been doing it for eight years."
Mom's chin came up. "So this is Jenna."
"No."
"She's put you up to — "
"Mom. Look at me." I waited until she did.
"Jenna didn't ask me to come here. Jenna specifically said she wasn't going to be the one to say it, because if she says it, she's the daughter-in-law who threw your gift back in your face, and that's what she is at every holiday for the rest of her life.
She's not wrong about that. So I'm here, and it's mine.
I'm the one who's been telling my kid wear Grandma's, you can wear Mom's another time, every single year, and there has never once been another time. "
She turned away and did something with a dish towel at the sink.
"Doreen's coming tonight," she said to the window. "I already sent Doreen a picture of that dress."
"I know."
"You don't know. You have no idea what I said to people."
"Then tell me."
"I said wait till you see my granddaughter." Her voice cracked on the last word and her hand came up like she meant to press it back in. "That's what I said. Wait till you see her."
I've never once been able to watch her do that and keep my feet, and I didn't manage it then either. I just kept my hands on the back of the chair.
"She's still your granddaughter. She's going to come through that door and hug you before she takes her coat off, same as every year."
"That isn't the point."
"I know it isn't."
"You've made me look — " She stopped and started over. "I'll have to explain it. All night. Forty-three people are going to ask me where the dress is, and I'll stand there and say my son decided against it."
"Then say that."
"What?"
"Say exactly that. Say Eric decided against it." I meant it. "Put it on me. I'd rather forty-three people think I'm a jerk than have Lucy think it."
She turned around at last, arms crossed, eyes bright, not crying, which was honestly worse.
"Karen's kids wear what I get them."
"Karen's kids don't build anything."
"That's a nasty thing to say."
"It's not nasty, it's just the difference." I let out a breath. "There's nothing in Karen's house that gets cancelled when you buy something. There is in mine."
She stood at the sink a long time with her back to me. Seventy-six years old, narrow shoulders in that orange sweater. My father's been gone nine years and she still sets the pot on his side of the stove out of habit.
"You know what I had," she said.
"Ma."
"One year I had a sheet. An actual sheet with holes cut in it, and my mother wouldn't cut the eyes big enough, so I walked around the block holding it up off my face." She rinsed a spoon that was already clean. "I'm not telling you that so you'll feel sorry for me."
"I know why you're telling me."
"I like buying her the good one. That's all it is. There's no more to it than that."
"I believe you."
"Then I don't understand why we're standing here."
"Because it lands on top of something. Every year. Not on nothing, Ma. On something that's already going."
She didn't answer that. She shut the water off and set the spoon in the rack, handle down, the way she does.
"I look forward to this all year."
"I know you do."
"I like watching her come through that door."
"She's going to come through that door with a six-foot wingspan and lights in the wings," I said. "You're going to hear the other kids from the driveway."
"Lights."
"Jenna wired it. Honestly, Ma, it's a hell of a thing."
She didn't answer that one either, just rinsed something that didn't need rinsing.
"You could have called me. You didn't have to come stand in my kitchen on the day."
"That's fair."
"On the day, Eric."
"You're right. I should have called Saturday night. I didn't know Saturday night." I picked up my keys. "I know now."
"Well. It's decided, apparently."
"It's decided."
"You'll tell her yourself. Lucy. Today, not tonight in my driveway."
"This morning."
"And you'll tell her it was you."
"It was me."
"Good," she said, in a voice with nothing good in it at all. "Then at least the child knows who to be annoyed with."
"That's the idea."
She followed me to the door, because she follows everybody to the door even when she's furious, but she didn't straighten my collar.
"Tell Jenna I need the corn dish by five. Not five thirty. The oven's full at five thirty."
"I'll tell her."
The storm door shut behind me. Through the glass I could see that cardboard cat with its dead spring, and behind it my mother already heading back to her list on the counter, because there were forty people coming and the tablecloths weren't out yet.
My hands were shaking in the truck, which was stupid, because nothing had happened. Nobody yelled. A woman was annoyed with me in a kitchen.
I sat in the driveway a minute, same as Tuesday, with my hand on the key.
I could see the whole repair from where I was parked — go back in, say look, let's split the difference, she'll wear it for the pictures, watch her face come back on like a porch light.
Fifteen seconds of work. I've done it a thousand times.
Four minutes. That's what it had taken.
Eight years, and it took four minutes, and I don't know how many times I've said another time to my daughter's face in my own living room because I couldn't stand to have four bad ones with my mother.
I backed out slow, because if you back out fast she notices.