Chapter 5
KATHY
Iwaited for a day off. I'm not proud of that — holding it until Thursday so I'd have the energy — but I know what I'm like at the end of a twelve, and I didn't want to do this badly.
Thursday I slept till seven-thirty like a civilian, ate a real egg, put actual clothes on. Jeans, a sweater, the earrings, because some part of me had decided this was a conversation you dress for. I cleaned the kitchen and ran the dishwasher at ten in the morning for four dishes.
At eleven Monica called. I watched her name sit on the screen on the windowsill over the sink, with the little photo from somebody's cookout, her in sunglasses with her chin up.
Eight rings. Then the voicemail chime, and then a text underneath it: Honey are you around?
I want to run the favor jars by you!! Also do you think people will steal the dippers — with three laughing faces.
I put the phone in the drawer with the take-out menus. Then I took it out again, because I'm not a woman who can leave a phone in a drawer with my mother eleven miles away, and set it face down on the counter instead.
At one I made myself eat a sandwich. At two I walked around the block because my legs wanted something to do. At three I sat on the edge of our bed with my hands in my lap and ran the conversation the way I run a handoff report — the order, the facts, the one number I couldn't get wrong.
Neil came home at four-fifteen, early, no game. He came in with his bag over his shoulder, took one look at the kitchen, and knew. He put the bag down by the door instead of carrying it upstairs.
"Okay," he said.
"Sit down."
"Should I be scared?"
"No. Sit down."
He sat in his chair, the one with the split in the seam. I sat across from him instead of beside him, which I'd thought about, with my hands on the table where he could see them.
"I want to say some things in order," I said. "I've been thinking about the order, so let me get through it."
"Kath—"
"In order, Neil."
He nodded and put both hands flat on the table, mirroring me without knowing he was doing it.
"One. Monica has not done a single thing to me in twenty years that wasn't love. I want that said first, before anything else, because I'm going to say some hard things after it and I don't want that one lost."
"Okay." He moved the sugar bowl two inches to the left, which is what he does with his hands, and then moved it back.
"Don't do the bowl. Just listen."
"I'm listening."
"Two. You did the best thing anybody has ever done for me, in 2006, in a parking lot outside that Italian place with the fish tank.
You told me nobody in your family would ever use the word step, and then you made it true.
Your mother made it true. Monica made it true hardest of all.
" My voice held. I'd practiced it in the shower, which is humiliating to admit.
"My daughter has never once in her life been the extra kid in a room.
Do you know what that's worth? I've met the other kind.
They come through my floor at nineteen with nobody in the waiting room. "
"Kathy."
"I'm not finished with two. They did it so well that when she was nine she told a girl at school that her aunt Monica taught her to swim, and it was true.
I sat in the car outside that school for ten minutes because I couldn't drive.
" I took a breath. "Three. This year I've been a wreck, and that's mine.
I fell asleep at my mother's with a fork in my hand.
I missed Bree's thing. In June Lauren asked if I wanted to come see a venue and I said whatever you want, honey, I trust you, because I'd been awake nineteen hours.
That's real. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I've been at my best."
"Nobody thinks?—"
"Four." I put my palm down on the table, once, quietly. "I found out about my daughter's bridal shower from a registry link. At ten-forty at night, in bed, next to you."
The refrigerator hummed. His jaw worked.
"I know," he said.
"Six weeks out. Room booked the day after the engagement, theme picked, ninety envelopes addressed, eight of the twelve dinner plates already claimed by people who knew before I did.
" I watched him. "Neil, I've been the mother of the bride since the second Saturday in September, and I learned the date of the first event from a green button that said VIEW REGISTRY. "
He didn't defend it. He sat there and took it in the face.
"Five. I'm going to tell you something you already know, so you'll understand what I'm actually saying, because I don't think you do."
"Kath, I know what I?—"
"There was a year," I said.
He stopped.
"Before you. After the divorce — her father was three states away by then, and he's been a phone call on birthdays ever since. A year and about two months, in that apartment over the dry cleaner, the one with the radiator that banged. Lauren was five when we moved in. She was six when I met you."
"I know the apartment."
"You've never been in it."
"No," he said.
"Nobody has. Rhonda's been in it. My mother came twice. That's it."
I turned my coffee cup around on the table because I needed somewhere to put my hands. Out in the street a car door slammed twice, the way they do when the first one doesn't catch.
"Lauren had a hard time that year. She stopped talking at school for about two months. She wet the bed at six, which humiliated her. And every night she'd ask me, in this very reasonable voice — she'd say, but who lives here with us. Like she was doing an inventory."
His eyes had gone wet. He didn't wipe them.
"Here's what I had," I said. "I worked six to two so I could get her off the bus. I had four hundred dollars a month after rent. And I had her hair."
"Her hair."
"Every morning. On the floor in front of the radiator, her between my knees, doing the plait — the flat one, the one that goes across and then down.
Eleven, twelve minutes of it." My voice went somewhere else for a second, so I brought it back.
"She'd sit still for it. She wouldn't sit still for anything else on this earth.
And Sundays I made the pancakes with the vanilla, because we couldn't afford to go anywhere, so Sunday had to be a place. "
"You still make those."
"I make them for eight people now. Same recipe. It was on the back of a box that doesn't exist anymore."
"I know the box."
"You've never seen the box, Neil, that's what I'm telling you. There was a whole box, in a cabinet, in a kitchen you were never in. It had a cartoon bear on the front holding a spoon."
"Kathy."
"That's not a sad story. That's the best thing I've ever done.
That's the year I became somebody's mother, all the way, by myself, on four hundred dollars.
Then you came, and then Monica came, and everything got better — everything, Neil, I'm not being cute, my whole life got better.
And all of you loved her so completely that you forgot there was a before. "
He shook his head slowly. He wasn't disagreeing; he was trying to keep up.
"I never asked you to make her less theirs," I said. "Twenty years, I was grateful. I am grateful. I asked you to remember she was mine first."
He put his hand over his mouth. Behind him, out the window, the Hollands' dog was working the fence line the way it does at four-thirty.
"I didn't forget that," he said, through his hand.
"I think you did. Not on purpose. I think you got so good at making sure nobody could tell where she came from that you filed the before away where even you can't find it."
"That's not fair."
"Maybe."
"Kathy, I have loved that kid?—"
"I know you have." I put my hand up, flat, the way I do at the nurses' station when two people start talking at once. "Neil, listen to me, because this is the part everybody's going to get wrong and I need you not to be everybody. I am not fighting your sister for my daughter's wedding."
He blinked. "Okay."
"I don't want the shower. I don't want to run it, I don't want to co-run it, I don't want to be handed a table to be in charge of.
Monica is better at that room than I will ever be, and Lauren is going to walk into it in November and cry because of Monica, and I will be glad.
" My voice thinned out, so I slowed it down. "I'm not asking for a job."
"Then what are you asking for?"
"There isn't a job for you yet, Neil. You still think this is about a party. Until you stop thinking that, every single thing you do is going to make it worse."
"Kath, I'm trying."
"I know you are."
"You come in here with the earrings on—" He stopped himself. "I'm not being smart. I mean you planned this. You planned a conversation with your husband. That's what's killing me, that you had to plan it."
"I did have to plan it."
"Why?"
"Because I've spent twenty years being the easiest person in your family. Because it's fine, honestly is basically my maiden name."
He laughed, one breath, no joy in it. "That's not?—"
"It's exactly true. And I did it to myself, partly, and I want to own my part before you offer to own it for me.
" I turned the cup again. "When I got tired this year I let things slide.
I let Monica pick things up because it was easier, and because there's something in me that can't ask for anything for myself without feeling like I'm handing somebody a bill. So I gave inches. That part's mine."
"That's not a crime."
"No. But here's what I need you to hear." I looked at him until he looked back. "I gave inches in a bad year. Nobody in this family asked me if they could have the yard."
He sat with that a while. Then he did the thing he always does, the thing I could set to music.
"What if I?—"
"Don't."
"Just listen. What if I got Lauren over here, this weekend, just the three of us, and I told her?—"
"Neil. What did I just say I wasn't asking for?"
"A job."
"And what are you about to arrange?"
He shut his mouth. He put both hands over his face for a second and took them away with his eyes red at the rims, and for about ten seconds he looked fifty-one.
"Then explain something to me," I said. "Because I've been sitting with a thing for two weeks that I can't make come out right, and I'd like you to help me."
"Anything."
"Monica told me she didn't want to bother me.
Said you told her I was down to nothing.
" I kept my voice level. "Bree's had a guest-list spreadsheet since last week.
Lauren told me, at this table, on Friday, that Monica has the whole thing handled so I don't have to lift a finger.
She thought that was good news. She was happy telling me. "
"She—"
"And then at the door, Lauren asked me, in the kindest voice, if it was all too much for me. With Grandma. And everything."
His hand came down off his mouth.
"So my question isn't how did Monica get the room," I said. "My question isn't why nobody sent me a text. Here's my question."
He waited.
"Who told Lauren I was too tired to be her mother? Because it wasn't me."