Chapter 10
NEIL
My sister called me every night for eleven nights.
Never during the day. Always between nine and ten-thirty, after her dishes were done, when the house was quiet and she'd had a glass of the white wine she keeps in the door of the fridge.
I took every one of them in the garage, sitting on the closed lid of the chest freezer with the door down, because the garage is the one room in my house where you can't be heard from the bedroom.
The first four were the same call.
"I've been sick about this for three days."
"I know."
"I haven't slept, Neil."
"I know, Mon."
"Do you know what our aunt said to me? She said, what did you do to Kathy?
On the phone. In that voice. Fifty-four years old and I'm being asked what I did.
" A long, wet breath. "And I said, I threw a girl a shower.
That's what I did. I put down eleven hundred dollars of my own money on a Sunday in November.
I addressed ninety envelopes at my own table until my hand seized, and now the entire family thinks I?—"
"She got it wrong because I hadn't called her yet. I called her Tuesday."
"And said what?"
"What I said in my kitchen. That you asked me, I answered for Kathy, and Kathy never said any of it."
"She's still telling people I?—"
"Then I'll call her again. I'll keep calling her."
Which I did, and there's nothing heroic in a phone list, which is all it was.
I made them in the car in the school lot with the engine running, twelve or thirteen calls over two weeks, every one of them starting with the same nine words: I told Monica that Kathy would be relieved.
Kathy never said it. Some of them understood immediately.
Two of them talked to me like I'd confessed to something embarrassing rather than something bad, in the tone you'd use with a man who'd had a little breakdown.
My cousin actually said, "Well, but she was tired, wasn't she?
" and I said, "That's not the point. Also, you don't know that. Ask her."
"Ask Kathy?"
"Ask Kathy," I said.
Nobody asked Kathy. Twenty years of me being the interpreter, and when I quit they didn't switch to the original — they just went quiet and waited for a new interpreter.
My father's youngest sister took three calls. She's eighty-one and she's been the switchboard of that family since the Nixon administration.
"It's Neil again."
"I know your voice."
"I need to go through it one more time, because I heard what you've been saying."
"I said your sister's been crucified." A long pull of breath, the kind that comes with a lifetime of other people's business.
"Neil, honey, what I don't understand is why this is a whole thing.
Kathy's a saint, everybody knows Kathy's a saint, she's been running herself ragged with her mother.
So Monica took the party. Where's the crime? "
"My wife found out she wasn't going to be with her own daughter on the morning of the wedding," I said. "From a girl at a salon, basically. Because I decided in July what she wanted."
The line went quiet. Then, in a completely different voice, eighty-one years old, the voice of a woman who buried a husband in 1998: "Oh. Oh, that's different, Neil."
"Yes."
"That's — no, that's different." A pause. "You did that?"
"I did that."
"Well," she said. "You'll have to live with it, then." And she hung up, and she has never once brought it up again, which in that family counts as absolution.
Bree got squeezed the hardest, because she's the one Monica calls, because Bree answers.
"Dad, she cried on the phone with me for forty minutes."
"I'm sorry, honey."
"She keeps asking me if I think she's a bad person." My daughter's voice was tight. "What am I supposed to say to that? Because I don't think she's a bad person. But I also keep thinking about Mom sitting at that dinner in October acting normal, and I want to throw up."
"You don't have to carry Aunt Mon. She's mine."
"She's my aunt."
"You can love her all you want. You don't have to be the one who makes her feel better about it." I switched the phone to my other ear. "When she calls, you can say, that's between you and Dad. That's it. That's a whole sentence."
"She'll be hurt."
"Yeah," I said. "She will."
Adam did what Adam does. He went away for nine days, then turned up on a Thursday with a bag of hardware to fix the storm door that had been sticking since spring. He never mentioned any of it until the end, standing in the driveway with his keys out.
"Is Kathy okay?"
"Not yet."
"Okay." He got in his truck. "Tell her the door's good now."
The call I didn't make took me about ten minutes.
I sat in the school lot one afternoon with the engine running and the bridal salon's number up on my phone, and I had it written out on the back of a permission slip, what I was going to say.
That nobody in this family speaks for my wife about that appointment, including me.
That if anything about the booking needs an answer, the person to call is Lauren.
It was a good speech. I'd have been proud of the wording.
Then I worked out what I was actually about to do, which was get on the phone to a stranger and arrange the terms of my daughter's appointment and my wife's afternoon, in my own voice, for my own comfort. The appointment isn't mine. Who goes isn't mine.
I put the phone in the cup holder and drove home, and not calling that salon is the most useful thing I did all week.
Then I called my sister, because the eleventh night was the one where she stopped crying and got practical, which is when Monica is most dangerous.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"Mon."
"No, listen, because I've got a good solution and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything.
" She was moving around her kitchen; I could hear the cabinet with the sticky hinge.
"The appointment. The twenty-eighth. It's in my name.
Lauren is going to have to call that salon and have an awkward conversation with a stranger about taking her aunt off her own dress fitting.
She'll put it off. She'll worry about it.
Then she'll do it in her car on her lunch break and feel like a monster.
That girl should not have to make that call. "
"Mon—"
"So I'll call them. I'll do it this afternoon.
I'll just quietly straighten the whole thing out — take my name off, put whoever on it, I don't need to know who — and nobody has to have a conversation about it.
It just gets fixed. She walks in on the twenty-eighth and it's right.
Nobody ever has to say a word to anybody.
" A chair moved. "That's not me taking anything. That's me cleaning up after myself."
I sat on the freezer in the dark in my garage with my coat still on. It was a good offer, and she meant every syllable of it, and if she'd made it to me in July I'd have said yes before she finished.
"No," I said.
"Neil."
"Don't touch the appointment."
"I'm trying to spare?—"
"I know what you're trying to do. Mon, listen to me.
" I had my hand over my eyes. "That appointment is Lauren's.
Who goes is Lauren's. If it's awkward, it's awkward.
She's twenty-six. She'll live through a phone call.
You calling a salon so my daughter never has to say out loud who she wants in a room with her — that's the whole thing.
That's what we did in July. You and I quietly sorted it out so nobody had to have the conversation, and the conversation was the only part that mattered. "
The line went quiet long enough that I thought she'd hung up.
"So what am I supposed to do? Nothing? Sit on my hands until June like a guest?"
"You're supposed to ask Lauren, out loud. Let her say no. If she says yes, you tell everybody you're doing it."
"That's insane."
"It's not insane. It's how everybody but us does it."
She was quiet a second. Then she said, in a small voice, the thing that told me she was going to survive this and never understand it. "I'm just trying to help."
"I know you are."
"I've been helping this family since Mom died, Neil. I do the ham."
"You do the ham."
"I do the ham," she said, and laughed, a terrible little laugh, and stopped.
"Mon. The shower's yours."
"Don't."
"I'm not handing it to you. I can't hand it to you — it was never mine to hand, that's the whole problem with me.
I'm telling you what's true. You booked it, you paid for it, you addressed every envelope, and it's going to be the most beautiful room that girl has ever walked into. Throw it. Please throw it."
Silence.
"As what," Monica said.
"As her aunt."
The silence went on a while.
"You know I've got forty-nine invitations on my counter I can't mail."
"I know."
"They've been there nineteen days. I have to move them every time I make dinner."
"I know."
"Because if I mail them the way they are, then I'm the woman who—" She stopped. "And if I redo them, it's a hundred and ten dollars in paper, and everybody will see that I redid them."
"Yeah," I said.
"You've put me in a position where there's no version of me that isn't the bad one."
"I put you there. That's accurate." I got up off the freezer because my back had gone.
"Mon, they're going to get mailed. Kathy isn't going to say a word about those invitations, I'd put money on it, because she doesn't want the shower, she never wanted the shower.
She wanted to be asked. You mail them how they are or you redo them. That's yours."
"And what do I tell Lauren?"
"Ask her what she wants. Out loud. In your own voice." I hit the button for the garage door so she'd hear it. "I have to go in. Kathy's home in ten minutes and I'm making eggs at ten at night, because that's what she eats after a twelve."
"You're making her eggs."
"I'm making her eggs, Mon."
"You never used to make eggs," my sister said, which is the closest she has ever come to saying she saw it.