Chapter 3
KATHY
For a week I didn't say it. I did something worse than saying it, which is that I stopped.
Monday I didn't fold the towels that were in the dryer when I got home. Tuesday I didn't text Lauren about the color. Wednesday I didn't call Monica back about the low arrangements, which she'd left a voicemail about, delighted, with an idea involving candles.
What surprised me was how quiet it was. Not the house — me. Twenty years of being the one who says it's fine, honestly, and when I set it down nobody heard a thing drop.
Thursday Bree came over to do laundry, because my stepdaughter is twenty-two and lives in an apartment with a broken machine and thinks of our house as an appliance. She got up on the counter and ate crackers out of the sleeve.
"Aunt Mon has a spreadsheet," she said.
"Does she."
"Like an actual spreadsheet. She sent it to me for the guest list. There's a column for dietary." Bree crunched. "She asked if you were doing a speech."
I kept my hands in the sink. "Did she."
"I said I didn't know." She looked up. "Are you?"
"I haven't thought about it."
"You should. You're funny when you don't try."
"Mm."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a mm."
"That's a no," Bree said, satisfied, taking another cracker.
"When did she send you the spreadsheet?"
She thought about it with her mouth full. "Um. Last week? Week before."
"Week before."
"She was asking if Sam's mom's sister counts as immediate." Bree shrugged. "I said ask Lauren. I don't know these people."
"What did she say about the guest list?"
"That she'd handle it." Bree turned the cracker sleeve upside down over her palm. "She says that a lot. It's sort of her thing now."
"Did she ask me?"
"Did she — what?" Genuine puzzlement, twenty-two years old, not a scrap of cruelty in her. "About the aunt?"
"About any of it."
"I don't know, Mom." She says Mom the way she's said it since she was eleven, a word that costs her nothing, which I have never once taken for granted. "She said you had enough going on. She said you were, like, running on fumes." Bree hopped down. "Are you? Because you kind of are."
"I'm all right."
"Okay." She hugged me sideways on her way past, the way she's done since she was nine, and that was the whole of it for her. Twenty seconds. A spreadsheet with a column for dietary, sent out to a twenty-two-year-old the week before I learned there was a party.
That night I caught myself at the sink with the water running over a colander, my phone propped against the window frame, typing a text to Monica with one wet thumb. I'd been typing it six or seven minutes, which I know because the water went cold enough on my wrist to notice.
Hey Mon! No pressure at all, but if there's anything left to do for the 15th I'd love to —
Delete.
Mon, I know I've been useless this year but I'd love to help with the shower if there's anything left —
Delete.
Mon, I hope this isn't weird, I just —
I stood there with a colander in one hand and read I know I've been useless this year sitting on my own screen in my own kitchen, in blue, waiting for me to hit the arrow. Then I turned the water off and stood in the noise of it stopping.
I was going to apologize. I was going to ask permission to attend my own daughter's party. I'd already drafted the concession, the flattery, the little joke to make it comfortable for her — twenty years of practice had made me fluent in all three.
And they hadn't made it up, either. I'd been a wreck.
In February I fell asleep in a chair at my mother's with a fork in my hand.
In April I missed Bree's thing at the school because I picked up a shift.
I said it's fine, it's fine, tell me everything, and then fell asleep on the phone while she told me.
In June, when Lauren asked if I wanted to come look at a venue, I said honey, whatever you want, I trust you, two hours out of a twelve, the words coming out of me like air out of a tire.
Honey, whatever you want. I said it enough that people believed me, and that part is mine.
But there's a difference between I trust you, pick the venue and she doesn't want to be at the shower, and somebody had walked that difference across the whole family without once stopping at my door.
Friday Lauren came for dinner, alone, Sam working.
She filled the kitchen the way she has since she was small, everything out of the bag onto the table — keys, gum, a swatch of something, phone already going.
Twenty-six years old with my mother's jaw and her own father's hands, which I stopped noticing about fifteen years ago.
Neil made the chicken, which he's better at than I am. He put the pan down in the middle of the table without a trivet, which he always does, and then moved it onto one, which he always does second.
"Aunt Mon found chargers," Lauren said.
"Chargers," Neil said.
"For under the plates. Mom, she's insane. She sent me eleven pictures of plates that go under plates."
"That's a thing?"
"It's a thing, apparently. She's so excited about it. She keeps saying she's been waiting for this since I was six." Lauren tore a piece of bread. "She cried on the phone, actually. Like, cried-cried."
"She loves you," I said.
"I know." My daughter looked at me, easy and open, no weather in her at all. "She said she's got the whole thing handled so you don't have to do a single thing. She was, like — fierce about it. She was like, your mother is not lifting a finger."
The kitchen went on around that sentence. Neil got up for the pepper. The fridge cycled.
"Mm," I said.
"I told her you'd probably try anyway." She grinned at me, warm, loving, absolutely sure of the ground she was standing on. "I was like, good luck, she'll be in there rearranging your flowers."
"Low ones," I said. "You can't see over the tall ones."
"See, that's what she said you said!" Lauren pointed the bread at me. "You two are the same person."
Neil laughed, reached over with his fork, stole a piece of chicken off his daughter's plate and got his hand slapped for it.
"What's the color?" he said. "Nobody will tell me the color."
"Sage," Lauren said. "And a rust. Like a burnt orange."
"Those are the same color."
"They are so not the same color."
"Kath, are those the same color?"
"They're not even close."
"See," Lauren said. "This is what I'm dealing with." She pulled her phone out, scrolled, held it up — napkins, two squares of fabric on a wood table in somebody's good light. "Which one."
I looked at them longer than they deserved. My daughter was holding her phone across my own table asking me which napkin, in a room where ninety invitations existed that I had never seen.
"The rust," I said. "The sage will go gray under those windows."
Her eyebrows went up. "Under what windows?"
"At Ellery House. The arched ones, all that north light." I put a piece of bread on her plate to give my hands something honest to do. "It's a beautiful room. Everything in there goes a little cooler than you think."
"Huh," she said, typing, and then, without looking up, "Does Aunt Mon know about the north light?"
"She does now."
"How do you even know that?"
"We do the retirement lunches there. Twice a year, same room, same bad coffee, same hundred folding chairs with the one bad leg."
"Your mother knows every room in this county," Neil said, refilling her water, pleased with me. "Every single room with a bad chair in it."
"Every room with a bad chair."
"She sat through Adam's graduation on a folding chair with one leg shorter."
"It was two legs," I said. "It was structural. I sat on that chair for an hour and forty minutes with my feet flat on the floor like a woman on a horse."
"You never said."
"I never say," I said, and got a laugh out of both of them, because at that point it was still a joke about furniture.
There's a version of me that would have let the rest of it lie down there forever, and she was close to the surface that night. The chicken was good. My daughter was happy. There is nothing in this world I want less than to be the woman who makes a room careful.
"Hey," Lauren said later, at the door, coat half on. "You'd tell me if it was too much. Right? With Grandma and everything. If it was too much, you'd say."
"Who said it was too much?" I said.
She tipped her head. "Nobody. I just know you've been wiped out."
"I'm not too tired for you."
"Mom." That soft embarrassed laugh they do when you get earnest on them. "Okay."
"I'm not."
"Okay." She kissed my cheek. "Text me about Grandma. Love you."
The door shut. Neil was at the sink with his sleeves pushed up, scrubbing the pan with the green side, humming along to the radio he'd put on low — a good man in a warm kitchen doing dishes he didn't have to do.
I stood behind him a second and looked at the back of his head. Twenty years of that head.
"Neil," I said. "When did Monica book Ellery House?"
"Mm? The day after, I think. She said she called that Sunday."
The day after. Not who told you about Ellery House. Not how do you know when she called.
He knew. He'd known since September.
I picked up the towel and dried a glass so my hands had something to do, and I could feel my own pulse in my jaw, because the thing I'd been treating as a lapse had a start date.
"Kath?"
"Nothing," I said.
He looked over his shoulder, smiled, went back to the pan. I stood in my kitchen drying a glass that was already dry, and decided, in the flat way you decide things at that hour, that I was going to find out exactly how this had happened.
Not who forgot me. Nobody had forgotten me. You don't hold a room six weeks out by forgetting.
Somebody had answered for me.