Chapter 13
ERIC
Ialways stay after to break down the tables. That's been my job since I was about twenty-five — Karen does the food, I do the garage.
There's a stretch at the end of that party, usually around nine forty, where the house empties out fast. One family leaves, everybody else remembers there's school tomorrow, and the coats come off the bed in the back room in armloads.
Somebody's kid is crying in the driveway about a bucket.
Then it's quiet, with the fog machine still going in the corner making nothing and forty paper plates in the trash with pumpkins on them.
I like that part. My father used to do the tables and I used to hand him the legs.
By ten the house was down to eight people, then four.
Jenna had taken Lucy home at nine forty because the kid had gone glassy, and they carried the wings out to the car between them like two people moving a pane of glass.
Lucy fell asleep before they got to the light on Delaney, still in the harness, Jenna told me later.
I folded the legs on the long table and leaned it against the wall by the water heater. Mom came out into the garage with her coat on over the orange sweater, the space heater still ticking behind her.
"Leave the round one. Karen's coming for it Sunday."
"Okay."
"And the good spoons don't go in the machine."
"I know they don't go in the machine."
She didn't go back in.
There were still four cups of cider on the workbench where people had set them down and forgotten about them, and somebody's kid had left a plastic pitchfork under the table.
The fog machine had run itself dry an hour before and was ticking as it cooled.
I collected the cups, and two of them still had cider in them, so I carried those out to the utility sink.
"That's Doreen's," Mom said, about one of them. "She'll say she didn't have any."
I kept working, because I know how this goes. If you look at her, she doesn't say it. Keep your hands busy and your back mostly turned, and she will.
"That was a hard thing to do to me on the day of."
"I know."
"In my kitchen. At nine in the morning, with forty people coming."
"You're right. I should've called Saturday night."
"You should have." She pulled her coat tighter. "I had to look at that bag hanging in the back bedroom every time somebody went for their coat."
I stacked the folding chairs four at a time, which is the wrong way to do it but faster. One of them has a leg that won't fold. It's the same chair every year, and every year I stand it against the freezer instead of fixing it.
"Doreen asked me twice. Twice, Eric. The second time she said, I thought you got her a dress, in front of Karen's mother-in-law."
"What'd you say?"
"I said plans changed."
"That was generous of you."
"It wasn't generous, it was quick." She sniffed. "Generous would have been telling her the truth, which is that my son told me at nine o'clock this morning. I sent that picture to four people."
"That part's on me too."
"It is."
She stood there while I did two more stacks.
"She was the loudest kid in this house tonight," Mom said.
"Who was?"
"Lucy. Running that yard with the little ones after her." She said it the way you'd report the weather. "She's never been the loudest kid in this house."
I didn't touch that. I've learned when not to touch something. I set the chairs down and turned around.
"I want to say something else," she said, "and then I'll let it go for tonight."
"Go ahead."
"Your father would have handled this differently."
"Probably."
"He'd have called me on the Sunday. He'd have said, Diane, the girls are making a thing, don't buy anything." Her arms were folded tight. "He did that. Twice, that I remember. Once about a bicycle."
I hadn't known about the bicycle. I stood there holding the leg of a folding table, finding out at fifty-four that my father used to run interference for people, quietly, and that I'd never once seen him do it.
"Why didn't he tell me?"
"Why would he tell you? You were a child."
"I've been fifty for four years, Ma."
"Well." She let a breath out through her nose. "He's been dead for nine."
She put the dish towel back on the hook it had come off.
"Can I say something about you and not about the dress?"
She didn't say yes. She didn't say no either, which with her is yes.
"You're the most generous person in this family.
I mean that. When Dad was sick you paid the water bill on our house for four months and never said a word about it, and I only know because I found the receipts in a drawer afterward.
When Lucy was born you drove out here every day for two weeks with food.
That's who you are, nobody's ever going to take it away from you, and I'm not trying to. "
Her chin came up a little, but her eyes went shiny and she looked hard at the freezer.
"So what is it, then."
"It's a rule. One rule, and it's mine, not anybody else's, so if you want to be mad about it, be mad at me."
"Go ahead."
"Ask before you buy something for a specific event.
" I said it slow, because I'd worked on it and I wanted it to come out as one clean thing instead of six.
"Birthdays, Christmas, whatever you want, no limits, you buy her whatever your heart says — that's yours.
But if it's a thing she's supposed to wear at a thing, Halloween or the spring concert or Easter, call first. Because there might already be a plan, and I'm not cancelling the plan. "
"Because Jenna — "
"No." I shook my head. "Not because Jenna. Because me. Because I'm the one who's been cancelling it. Eight years, Ma. I did that. Not you."
She stood there in her coat with her arms crossed.
"And Christmas? Am I allowed to buy her a Christmas present, or do I call first for that too?"
"Christmas is a present. Buy her whatever you want."
"The concert in March. She's got a spring concert."
"If there's a dress code, call me. If there isn't, buy her a dress."
"So it's the costume."
"It's anything where there's a plan already going, which is almost never. This is one weekend a year, Ma. I'm asking for one phone call in September."
She pressed her lips together and looked at the water heater.
"I can't promise you I'll stop buying things."
"I know."
"I see something in a window and I think of her, and I'm not going to walk past it at my age because of a rule."
"Then don't."
"What?"
"Buy it. If you see it and you love it and you want her to have it, buy it. That's yours to do." I picked up the last two chairs. "But buying it doesn't decide what she wears. Those are two different things, and I've been treating them like one thing my whole life, and I'm done doing that."
"That's a hard thing to say to somebody who's giving you a present."
"It's the only version that works." I set the chairs against the wall.
"Right now the present decides. You hand it over, everybody at the table rearranges around it, and you don't even have to ask, because nobody wants to be the one who wasted your money.
That's a lot of power for a bag from the mall. "
"You make it sound like I'm running something."
"I don't think you know you're doing it. That's what I've been trying to say all week." I rubbed my face. "You don't know because it's always worked, and it's always worked because of me."
She looked at me a long moment. "That's the bicycle again."
"What?"
"Nothing." She waved it off. "You sounded like him. It's late. Can I ask you one thing?"
"Go ahead."
"Did Jenna cry?"
I stopped with my hand on the last chair. "About what?"
"About any of it. Over the years." She was looking somewhere around my collar. "You said eight years. I've been standing in there all night doing the math on eight years."
"I don't know. I never saw her."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
She nodded once. "Well."
Then she went and turned the space heater off at the wall, and unplugged it, which she does even though the switch is fine. She wound the cord around her hand.
"The wings did move nicely," she said, with her back to me.
"They did."
"That's a lot of wire."
"Nine feet, apparently."
"Hm," Mom said.
She carried the heater in with the cord come loose and dragging behind her. She didn't notice. I didn't say anything. At the door into the kitchen she stopped with her hand on the frame.
"I'm still annoyed with you."
"That's allowed."
"I'm going to be annoyed with you at Thanksgiving."
"You're annoyed with somebody at every Thanksgiving. Last year it was Rob."
"Rob deserved it."
"He did."
"For a while."
"Take your time."
"There's corn dish left. Take it home, I'm not eating that all week."
"Karen'll take it."
"Karen's got her own." She had the door half open, and then she stopped. "It was good this year. The paprika."
"Tell her that."
For a second I thought I'd pushed it too far.
"I will," Mom said. "Thursday. I'm not calling her tomorrow."
"Thursday's fine."
"Get the light on your way out," she said, and the door shut behind her.
I stood there a second with the light still on. Down the street somebody's decorations were still going, the same eight seconds of organ music on a loop, over and over, the way they'd been since the first of the month.
Then I did one more pass through the house, which is also part of the job. Chairs back where they live, card table down, the good serving spoons out of the dishwasher because she doesn't trust it with those.
In the back bedroom the coats were gone off the bed, and somebody had turned the light off in there. The garment bag was still on the nail where I'd hung it, alone now on an empty wall.
I took it down and carried it out to the truck. She didn't stop me. She was in the kitchen with the water running.
I got the light and drove home.
Jenna had left the porch light on for me. In the front room the wings were back up in the dark, hanging from the two cup hooks in the ceiling above the reading chair, one of them slightly lower than the other.