Chapter 12
KATHY
Itried to write it down. That's the part I'd take back.
Wednesday afternoon I sat at the kitchen table with the legal pad out of the garage, the one with three sheets torn off the top, and started a list. Twenty-two years of charting has taught me that a thing you don't write down gets remembered differently by everybody in the room.
I got five lines into it. They were good lines.
I'd been building them in the car for a week.
Then Neil came in from the yard with leaves in the treads of his boots, looked over my shoulder, and said the thing that stopped me.
"Is that for me?"
He said it hopefully, standing there in his coat, looking at a numbered list the way a man looks at a job he can finish.
"Give me that," he said. "I'll do all of it. Kath, I'll put it on the fridge."
And I saw the whole next six months laid out clear as a strip. Neil with my list on the refrigerator, crossing things off. Item four complete. Item five complete. Him coming to me in February to ask whether he was passing.
I tore the page off the pad, folded it in half, put it in the pocket of my cardigan.
"No," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because then it's a test. And you'd pass it, because you're good at tests, and then you'd be done." I pushed the pad away. "I'm not giving you a list, Neil. I'm giving you the two things I know I can't live with. The rest you're going to have to figure out yourself."
He sat down slowly, still in his coat.
"Okay."
"Nobody answers for me again. Not your sister, not your aunt, not Lauren, not a florist, not a girl at a salon with a clipboard.
If somebody wants to know what I want, they ask me.
And when they ask you instead — which they will, because they've been asking you for twenty years — you don't fill it in for them out of kindness. You say ask her."
"Yes."
"And you're the one who holds that with your family. Not me. I'm not spending from now until June reminding forty people that I have a mouth."
"I hold it," he said. "Say it again so I've got the words right."
"You say ask her. Then you hang up."
"Ask her. Then hang up." He nodded. "What's two?"
"Monica's hurt is yours."
He put his hands on the table.
"I love her," I said. "That's the part nobody's going to believe when this gets told.
Two months ago I'd have sat with your sister for three hours and made her tea.
But I'm not the one who comforts her about a thing that was done to me, and Lauren isn't either.
She's twenty-six. She gets to plan her wedding without spending every night convincing your sister she still loves her. "
"She calls at nine-thirty," he said. "Every night."
"I know she does. Keep taking it in the garage."
He nodded, and then he sat there waiting for three, four, five.
"That's it," I said.
"That can't be it."
"It's it."
"Kathy, there's — what about your mother, what about the Sundays, what about when you're—" He stopped, hunting for it. "There's more wrong than two things."
"Yes," I said. "There is."
"So tell me."
"No." It cost me more to get out than anything I'd said to him in October. "Because if I tell you, you'll do every one of them on time, forever, and I still won't know what you'd have thought of on your own."
He didn't like it. He sat there with his jaw working, a man who'd been handed a season with no plays in it.
"That's not fair."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
The folded page stayed in that cardigan pocket until the first week of December, when I found it doing laundry and read it standing in the basement.
Three of the five had happened by then. He'd thought of two of them himself.
One of them he has never done, to this day, and I've decided to let him not do it.
We told Adam and Bree on Friday night, together, in our kitchen with the pizza boxes still out, because if you make an occasion out of it the kids brace for divorce.
Neil did the talking. I let him, on purpose — not because I couldn't, but because it needed to come out of the mouth that said it. It took him four sentences. They'd both had the long version on the phone already, so he gave them July, the question, what he'd answered, and the email.
Bree had already heard all of it. She cried anyway.
Adam sat with his forearms on the table. "So Aunt Mon thinks Kathy said she didn't want it."
"Aunt Mon thought that, because I told her. She knows now."
"Does she get it?"
"No," Neil said. "Not yet. Maybe not ever."
"Huh." Adam looked at me. "Kathy, for what it's worth, I never thought that. That you didn't want it."
"Thank you, bud."
"I just thought Aunt Mon was being Aunt Mon." He shrugged, twenty-four years old, a man who fixes a storm door instead of making a speech. "She does that. She did it with my graduation party. I didn't care, it was a party, there was a sheet cake."
"This isn't a sheet cake," Bree said.
"I know it isn't. That's why I'm sitting here."
"There's one more thing," Neil said, "and then we'll eat the rest of that pizza cold like animals.
If either of you gets asked what Kathy wants — by Aunt Mon, by anybody on my side, by a woman at a church hall — you say, ask her.
That's it. You don't guess, you don't smooth it over, you don't say she's probably fine with it. "
"And if they say we're being weird?" Bree said.
"Then you're being weird."
"Dad."
"I'm serious, honey. I did the smooth version for twenty years. It looked like manners." He picked a crust up off the box and put it back down. "It wasn't."
Adam pointed two fingers at me. "Also. You should tell us when you're wrecked. You never say. You sat through my whole thing at the fire academy on a bad knee, never said a word. Bree had to tell me after."
"That's a different?—"
"It's the same," Adam said. "You do it too."
I opened my mouth to argue with my stepson, which is a thing I've done maybe nine times in twenty years, and then shut it again. He was right. And Neil was studying the table very carefully so as not to look triumphant.
Monica texted me on Thursday. One message, 4:12 in the afternoon, while I was in the med room.
Kathy — I am not going to bother you with a long thing. I hope you know that everything I did, every single bit of it, I did out of love for that girl and for you. I hope one day we can talk about it. The room is going to be beautiful. She is going to cry. M.
I read it twice. Then I did the thing I wouldn't have been able to do in September, and forwarded it to my husband with three words. This one's yours.
He called her that night from the garage. I didn't ask what he said. When he came back in he sat down on the couch beside me without a word and we watched most of something neither of us could have described afterward.
Lauren called Monica herself on Sunday. I didn't ask her to. In that family it'll get told for the next twenty years as me putting my daughter up to something.
She called me after, from her car outside the grocery store with the engine off.
"I did it."
"How was it?"
"Bad." She blew out a breath. "Not — she wasn't mean. She never gets mean, that's what makes it so hard. She just kept saying she didn't understand."
"What did you say?"
"I said, Aunt Mon, I love you. I said I'm so glad you're doing the shower, I mean it, and I want you standing next to me in every picture.
" Her voice wobbled, then didn't. "And then I said, I'm going with my mom for the dress.
Just me and her. And you're not coming. Bree's not coming.
Sam's mom's not coming. It's not because of anything you did. It's because that one's ours."
"How'd she take that?"
"She said, 'Of course, honey, whatever you want.'" Lauren let out a wet laugh. "In the voice. Mom, she used the voice on me. And then she said — get ready — 'I just hope your mother knows I never meant to take anything from her.'"
"And what did you say?"
"I said, 'Tell her that. Not me.'" A pause. "Was that mean?"
"No," I said. "That was the most useful sentence anybody's said in a month."
She came by that night on her way home, standing in the doorway with her keys still in her hand, not even all the way inside. "Hang on, I brought the thing," she said, and dug in her coat pocket, and out came the card.
The salon gives you a card. Heavy stock, the striped awning printed on the front, a line inside where the girl fills it in by hand.
Sat. Nov. 28 · 11:00 a.m. · Party of 4 · MONICA
My daughter put it on the kitchen counter, took the pen out of the mug by the phone, and drew a line through her aunt's name. Not a scribble — one flat line, the way you'd cross out a wrong answer. Then she wrote underneath it, in handwriting that hasn't changed since she was fourteen:
Party of 2. Lauren + Mom.
"I called them Monday," she said. "It's still eleven o'clock. I told the girl to put it under me."
"Under you."
"Under me. Then she asked who the second person was, and I said, my mother." She put the pen back in the mug. "I have to go, Sam's doing something insane with a chicken. Love you."