Chapter 15
JENNA
The squid started the second week of September, same as always, with a library book.
It's a habit now. First Saturday after school starts we go to the branch on Willard, Lucy spends an hour in nonfiction and comes out with four books, and one of them turns out to be the costume.
Last year it was moths. This year it was a book about deep water with a fold-out page in the middle, and she opened that fold-out on the picnic table outside the library and didn't say a word for a full minute.
"Mom."
"I see it."
"It has a beak."
"I see the beak, Lucy."
"Do you know how big the eyes get? Bigger than your head. Bigger than a dinner plate."
"We're not doing a dinner plate."
"We're doing a dinner plate," she said, and she was right, and we did.
Halloween did not fix Christmas. At Christmas Diane bought Lucy a coat she already had a version of.
I watched Eric's face run the whole cycle in about two seconds before he said thank you and hung it in the closet.
Nobody wore it anywhere in particular. That one didn't matter.
Nothing was going to get cancelled by a coat.
In March there was a bigger one, about the spring concert, and he had to go over there, and it took more than four minutes. He came home quiet and sat in the truck in the driveway a while before he came in, and I let him sit.
That's what it's been. Not a transformation. A series of small ordinary corrections by a man who is not naturally good at making them.
The text came on the sixteenth of September, which I only know because Eric showed it to me while I was in the middle of the dishwasher. He held the phone out and I dried my hands.
It was a link to a store page — a galaxy fairy thing, purple going into black, with a printed skirt like a nebula and wings made of iridescent film. Two hundred and eighty dollars. Under the link my mother-in-law had typed:
Lucy would look adorable in this!!
Two exclamation points. She does two.
I looked at Eric's face, and he wasn't panicked. He was standing in my kitchen holding a phone the way you stand when you've been expecting a bill and it's finally shown up.
"You want to see what I'm sending?"
"Yes."
He typed it in front of me, then turned the screen around before he hit send, which he did not have to do, and which I have not forgotten.
Ask Lucy before you buy it. She and Jenna may already have a plan.
A year ago I'd have taken that phone out of his hand and drafted it myself. Then it would have been my sentence in his mouth, and Diane would have known inside a day. I stood there with a dish towel and let a fifty-five-year-old man write his own text message to his own mother.
Nothing happened for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven, because I finished the dishwasher, started the counters, and looked at the clock twice.
Then: All right.
Two words. My mother-in-law is capable of a great deal of communication in two words.
"That's it?" I said.
"That's it."
"That's it for now."
"That's it for now," Eric agreed, and put the phone in his pocket. "She'll call me Thursday about something else and work it in sideways."
She did, too. Thursday, about whether we were coming for Columbus Day. Somewhere in the middle she mentioned that she'd seen the fairy costume again and it had gone down to two thirty. Eric said that was a good price and left it there.
She called Lucy on Saturday. I know exactly how it went, because Lucy was out on the front steps with the phone on speaker while she painted a piece of cardboard, and I was inside with the window open.
"Now, honey, I saw a costume online and it's beautiful, and I wanted to ask you first."
"Ask me what?"
"Whether you and your mother have got something going already."
There was a pause, and I heard my daughter's brush stop. I had my hands in the sink and I did not breathe.
"We're doing a giant squid," Lucy said.
"A what?"
"A giant squid. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles, and the tentacles are longer, and Mom says we can do them on fishing line so they move."
"Fishing line."
"It's going to be like eleven feet."
"Eleven feet," Diane said.
"Yeah."
Another pause.
"Well," Diane said. "Then I won't get the other one."
"You can still get it," Lucy said, straight away, because she's a good kid and she felt it. "I could wear it — "
"No, no. You've got a squid." A sniff, the dry kind, not the wounded kind. "It was a fairy anyway. You'd have looked like every third girl at that party."
Lucy laughed. "Grandma. Can I ask for something instead?"
"Ask."
"Can you get me the eyes?"
"The what?"
"The eyes. For the squid. They have to be really big, and Mom found some that are like six inches, but they're eleven dollars each and Mom said we'd think about it."
I stood at the sink with my hand over my mouth.
"How many do you need," Diane said.
"Two. Squids have two."
"I'd hope so."
"And Mom says we're not paying eleven dollars each for eyes."
"Your mother is very sensible," Diane said, "and I'm buying the eyes."
I put my head against the window frame. Out on the steps Lucy had gotten paint on the concrete, which I was going to find out about in April.
"Grandma."
"What."
"Do you want to see the beak? I drew the beak."
"Send me the beak," Diane said.
They came on Wednesday in a box far too large for what was in it, with a card that said For the squid.
— Grandma. They were, in fact, six inches.
They were also the wrong kind, some hard acrylic dome meant for a stuffed animal, with no way to mount them and a flat backing that wouldn't sit right against a curve, so we had to build a whole housing.
Two nights of it. Foam board, hot glue, a ring of felt to hide the seam.
We did it anyway, and they're in the head now, and when the light hits them they look wet, which is the entire point of an eye. Lucy has photographed them from four angles.
Diane came by on a Sunday to drop off a pie plate she'd been holding since August, and stood in my kitchen doorway with her coat still on, looking at it.
"It's got no legs yet."
"Arms. Eight of them. They're on the chair."
"It's very large, Jenna."
"It's eleven feet."
"In this house?"
"In this house."
She looked at it a while longer, then pointed at the head with one finger, at the place where the housing meets the mantle and you can see the felt ring if you know to look.
"That's where my eyes went in," she said.
"That's where your eyes went in."
"Hm," said Diane, and asked whether I had her good pie plate, the deep one, because she was doing two for Thanksgiving. At the door she stopped and wanted to know whether the tentacles were the long ones or the short ones. I told her the long ones. She said that made sense.
That was the third week of September. The table's been unusable since. Eric has eaten standing up at the counter four nights running without a word about it.
The moth is still on its rack in the basement. Lucy went down in June for the beach umbrella and came back up wearing it, which is a thing an eleven-year-old does and a thing a twelve-year-old does not do, so I'm counting it.
She wore it twice more last year, which I want on the record.
She wore it to the school parade two days later, with the tails pinned up at the ankles the way she'd worked out at the kitchen table, and Mrs. Vargas allowed it.
And she wore it in April to a science night at school where you were supposed to present an organism, which is possibly the single greatest use of a Halloween costume in human history.
She got a ribbon for it. The ribbon's on her corkboard, over the desk, where she can see it from the bed.
The dress went to the church trunk-or-treat that weekend, then to a friend's birthday in December, then lived on the back of her door for six months because she liked looking at it. In July she wore it out to the car to go get ice cream.
That's what happened to the three hundred and forty dollars. It got worn about as much as anything else in this house.
Right now, this minute, it's the second Tuesday in October, there's a stack of cardboard on my kitchen table two feet high, and the good scissors are lost. There's a length of PVC leaning in the corner, waiting to be the spine of the mantle.
Eight arms cut, four of them painted, three of those still tacky.
The mantle is a laundry basket with the bottom cut out, which was Lucy's idea and is better than mine was.
The beak is on its third version, and the first two are in the recycling under the sink where I put them so she'd stop looking at them.
There's a jar of paint water next to his coffee cup, and the glue gun is on its foil square with a web of dried glue hanging off the tip.
Eric came in ten minutes ago and stood behind Lucy's chair with his hands in his pockets, taking his time the way he does.
"That's a lot of arms."
"Eight is the correct number of arms," Lucy said.
"I'm not disputing the number. I'm observing the volume."
"Can you hold this?"
He can hold this. He held one for six minutes in this same kitchen a year ago and thought he was being generous about it, and on Sunday he came home with the pipe without anybody asking him to.
Lucy's at the table right now with a marker in her teeth, arguing with me about whether the suckers need to be individually cut.
They do not need to be individually cut. There are one hundred and sixty of them.
She's already cut nine. They're in a margarine tub on the windowsill, they don't match, and she has asked me about them twice since Sunday. Every single one of them is going on.
She is going to win.
THE END
Thank you for reading The Costume His Mother Bought.
Jenna and Eric's story is part of When His Family Came First — stories about women whose work was real all along, the family money that quietly overruled it, and the husbands who finally learned the difference between a gift and a decision. No cheating. Earned grovels. Always a happily ever after.
If you've ever made something with your own hands and watched it get called a hobby, a short review means more than you know. It's how these books find the next reader.
Six years of sold-out Saturdays at the farmers market — and he told his business partner she "doesn't work."
Birdie's sourdough sells out by ten. Her honey comes from her own hives.
There's a line at her table before she's finished unpacking.
Her husband has never once come — he calls it "her little stand," and one afternoon she learns he's told the man he's going into business with that his wife doesn't have a job at all.
She has a permit. A ledger. A waiting list. What she doesn't have is a husband who's seen any of it.
If Jenna's six weeks got waved off as a craft project, Birdie's six years will land the same way — and so will the day her husband finally has to look at what her hands built.
The Business He Called a Hobby