Chapter 14
JENNA
The first two days after were nothing. Thursday everybody was tired.
Friday Lucy had a half day, because the school had moved its costume parade to that morning to cover the in-service day, and she wore the moth to it.
Then a friend came over. I made a grocery run, and Eric worked late because the number four line went down again.
We were polite. We were fine. There was a costume hanging in the front room on two cup hooks that neither of us mentioned once.
Twenty-two years of two-days-after. Most of them end with everybody relieved it's over, and things going back the way they were with a small adjustment nobody mentions. Then eleven months later you find out nothing moved.
The Saturday after, Eric brought the bin up from the basement without being asked. I was on the couch with coffee at nine in the morning and I heard the basement door, then the particular grinding sound that bin makes coming off the shelf, then him swearing quietly at the Christmas linens.
He put it on the coffee table and sat down on the floor with his back against the couch.
"What are we doing," I said.
"I want to see them."
"You've seen them."
"I've seen them in pictures." He got the lid off. "That's not the same."
So we went through it, all of it, on a Saturday morning with Lucy still asleep upstairs and the radiators knocking.
He took the fox ears out first and turned them over, and found the wire I'd put in the second time that still hadn't fixed the droop.
He put the astronaut helmet on. It doesn't fit an adult head.
It sat up on top of his skull like a bucket, which it is, and he wore it for about a minute anyway while he dug for the visor piece.
That had come loose and worked its way down to the bottom under the ribbons.
The jellyfish ribbons had knotted themselves into one solid mass.
"How long did this take?"
"The ribbons? Two nights."
"Two nights of cutting ribbon."
"Two nights of cutting ribbon and one very good night of putting the lights in."
"What's this?" He'd found the gallon bag of scraps.
"Fabric."
"Why is it sorted?"
"Because in year three I lost an entire evening looking for a specific green."
He turned the bag over. You could see the layers through the plastic, the greens together, the oranges together, a little wad of white fur off the fox chest.
"There's stuff in here from every year."
"That's how it works. Whatever's left goes back in, and next September we dump it out and see what we've got, and half the time it decides the costume.
" I pointed at a piece of blue satin near the bottom.
"That's from a dress of my mother's. It's been in there since before Lucy was born.
It's been the water on the jellyfish, the sky on a rocket, and one year it was a river. "
He sat with the bag in his lap a while.
"I thought this was a bin of old costumes."
"It's a supply."
He found the dragon tail last and held it up by the tip so the felt spikes flopped over, and laughed at the spot where they go from careful to catastrophic.
"What happened here?"
"It got to be eleven o'clock."
"She was three."
"She was three, and she was asleep on the couch right there, and I'd told her it would be done when she woke up." I pulled my feet up under me. "I was forty-three. I thought I was so tired. I had no idea."
He put the tail in his lap.
"I want to say some things. I've been writing them down at work, which is stupid, but if I don't say them in an order I'll say one and think I'm done."
"Okay."
He looked at the tail instead of at me, which was fine.
"I treated your time like it was free. Not by accident — it was the useful thing to believe, so I believed it. Every year I did a piece of math where Mom's money was on one side and nothing was on the other, and the reason nothing was on the other side is that I never put your hours on the sheet."
"Okay."
"Second thing. I let her spending decide what our family does. Every year. She'd buy a thing without asking, and the second she'd bought it, that was the plan, and everybody rearranged. I told myself I was being practical about waste. I wasn't. I was scared of my mother's face."
I didn't say anything. It's not my job to make that easier while he's saying it.
"Third." His thumb went along the seam of the tail. "Lucy came to you with a diagram. She sat on the laundry step and tried to solve it. That's mine too. She could feel it in the room for three days, and she thought it was hers to fix, and she thought that because I wouldn't."
"Yeah," I said. "That one's the one."
"I know it is."
He put the tail down and sat there a while with his hand flat on the lid of the bin, and when he started again his voice had changed.
"I let you carry it alone for eight years, and then I took four minutes on Wednesday, and I've been feeling like a hero about it since." It came out fast, like he'd been holding it. "I caught myself in the truck last night. Feeling good. Feeling like I'd done a big thing."
"You did do a thing."
"I did the minimum thing." He shook his head. "Eight years of you eating it, one bad conversation from me, and I want a parade."
"You're not getting a parade."
"I know I'm not getting a parade."
"You're getting a corn dish and a moderately annoyed mother."
"That's about right." He turned the bin lid over in his hands.
"I'm not going to tell you it won't come back, either.
Christmas is eight weeks out. She's going to buy Lucy something for the concert, or buy her something and then be hurt about it, and I'm going to feel it in my gut the way I did standing in her kitchen. That's in me. I'm fifty-four."
"So what do you do."
"What I did Wednesday. Which took four minutes, by the way. Four minutes. That's what eight years of this was worth."
I put my coffee down. "I want to say my part."
"You don't have — "
"I do." I got down off the couch onto the floor next to him, which my knees did not enjoy. "I said it was fine. Eight years, every single time. It's fine, Grandma's is beautiful, go have fun."
"Because of Lucy."
"Mostly because of Lucy." I made myself finish it.
"And partly because I didn't want to be the one who ruined Halloween.
There's a version of me who says something the first year, when it's small and it's one dress, and everybody says oh, we didn't realize, sorry.
That's a ten-minute conversation. I didn't have it, and then it was too late to have it about one dress, because by then it wasn't one dress. "
"That's not the same as what I did."
"No, it isn't. I'm not offering it as a trade, I'm telling you it's true."
He nodded.
"There's one more thing I want," I said.
"Name it."
"The next time it's your mother, you go. Not me. Not a text from both of us, not a conversation where I'm standing there being reasonable while she looks at me." I made myself hold his eyes. "You go over there by yourself and you have the four bad minutes."
"Okay."
"That's the actual thing, Eric. Not the apology. The four minutes."
"I know it is." He picked at the edge of the fox ear. "It's the only part that costs anything."
"Yes."
"You've been paying it for eight years and I've been sitting in the truck."
"Yes."
We sat on the floor with an open bin of eight years of cardboard and felt between us, and outside somebody was running a leaf blower.
"Come here," I said.
He came here.
We stayed like that a while, his face in my hair, his hand flat between my shoulder blades, neither of us talking, because everything that needed saying had been said before ten in the morning and there was nothing left but the actual holding.
"You smell like the basement," I said eventually.
"You're welcome."
"That was not gratitude."
He laughed into my hair, then kissed me properly, the first time in about a week that either of us had wanted to, and his hand came up along my jaw. The bin lid slid off the coffee table onto the floor and neither of us went after it.
Upstairs a door opened.
"Kid's up," he said against my mouth.
"Kid's up."
We were on our feet and three feet apart by the time she came down, which she noticed, because she's eleven and not stupid. She said "gross" without any real feeling and went to the cereal cabinet.
Putting the bin back together took longer than taking it apart, because Eric wanted to know where things went.
"Does the helmet go on top or bottom?"
"Bottom. Hard things on the bottom."
"What about the ears?"
"Ears go in the little bag with the antlers, or they get crushed."
"There's a little bag."
"There's a little bag, Eric."
He found the graph paper sketch of the fox head, the one with the ears drawn twice, and held it up. "Can I keep this?"
"It goes in the bin."
"Can I keep it out."
I looked at him sitting on my living room floor at ten in the morning with a piece of graph paper in his hand.
"Yeah. Keep it out."
It's on the corkboard in the kitchen now, next to the school calendar and the dentist card. He put it up himself with a red pushpin, slightly crooked, and I haven't straightened it.
Later that afternoon we dealt with the wings. The bin was never going to work. Six feet of wire and organza doesn't go into a plastic tub, and the honest truth is that in a normal year I'd have folded them. They'd have creased. By February they'd have been trash.
Eric came back from the hardware store with two eight-foot lengths of PVC, a package of hooks, and a canvas drop cloth.
"What's the pipe for?" I said, when he came in with it over his shoulder.
"The wings."
"The wings go in the bin."
"The wings don't fit in the bin. You'd have to fold them, and if you fold them the organza creases and the wire takes a set, and then next April when she wants to put them on they look like garbage."
I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at him. "Who told you that?"
"Nobody told me that. I looked at them." He set the pipe against the wall. "It's a wire structure with a fabric skin. You don't fold a wire structure."
He built a rack in the corner of the basement by the stairs, out of the way of the furnace.
Two uprights, one crossbar, hooks set so the harness hangs with the wings free and nothing resting on the tails.
Then he wrapped the whole thing loose in the drop cloth, like a garment bag for something six feet wide.
It took him two hours. It is not a beautiful piece of carpentry, and the uprights aren't exactly plumb.
We hung the moth on it together and I got the tails straight. Lucy stood at the bottom of the stairs watching, and said it looked like a museum.
Then she went up, and I stayed down there a minute with the light on.
Eight years of Halloweens went into a plastic tub with a lid that doesn't sit flat.
This one got two hours of a Saturday and eleven dollars of pipe.
I stood at the bottom of my own basement stairs and looked at it longer than I'd admit to anybody.
Then I turned the light off, went up, and started dinner.