Chapter 14
NEIL
The Monday after the shower I drove over to my sister's house on my way home from practice, without calling first, with my whistle still in the truck cup holder.
She opened the door in her reading glasses with a dish towel over her shoulder.
"Well," she said.
"Can I come in?"
"It's your family's house too," Monica said, which is a sentence with about nine years of history in it, and which I let go by.
The box was on the counter. A shirt box, white, two inches deep, forty-nine envelopes in my sister's handwriting, addressed to people who had, in the end, come to the shower anyway.
The originals. She'd redone the whole batch in the first week of November, a hundred and ten dollars in paper, mailed the new ones on a Tuesday and kept these.
The box had been sitting there since the middle of October, and she'd moved it down to the end by the toaster where the sun gets it in the afternoon, so the top ones had gone slightly yellow along one edge.
I didn't touch it yet.
"I came to say a thing and then I'll get out of your hair."
"You've been saying things for a month."
"Yeah." I put my hands in my jacket pockets. "Mon, that room was the best thing anybody's done for that girl in ten years."
Her chin went up.
"The branches," I said. "Lauren's going to have a picture of herself in that doorway on a wall for the rest of her life, and that's you.
Nobody in this family did that, you did that, out of your own pocket, with your own hands, at your own table until your hand cramped.
" She'd gone very still, so I made myself keep going.
"I'm not saying it to make anything even.
There's nothing even. I'm saying it because it's true, and because I've been so busy being accurate for a month that I never said the true part. "
Monica took her glasses off, folded them, set them on the counter.
"She wrote everything down," she said. "Kathy. On the gift list. She put who gave the — she wrote out that the towels were from the girls at Lauren's office, with their names."
"That's what she's like."
"I know what she's like, Neil, I've known her twenty years." She wiped at the counter with the towel, at nothing. "I only ever wanted that girl to feel like ours."
There it was. The whole of my sister in nine words.
I could have said a lot of things. I've had time since to think of better ones, and worse ones, and the worse ones were louder at the time.
"She is ours, Mon," I said. "She always was. That doesn't make all of us the same thing to her."
Monica looked at me.
"That's a very neat sentence."
"It took me three weeks and a lot of help."
"Mm." She turned the towel over in her hands. "I still think you've made an awful lot out of a party."
"I know you do."
"I'd have taken nothing off her if anybody had told me to leave it alone. One word from her, Neil. One word."
"She didn't know there was a thing to say a word about. That's mine, Mon. Not yours. Mine."
My sister looked out her own kitchen window a second. There's a feeder out there she fills every other day, which she's done since our mother died.
"Well," she said. "It was a beautiful room."
"It was a beautiful room."
"The branches were forty dollars." She said it to the window. "People thought I'd spent a fortune. They were forty dollars from a man on Route 9."
That was all of it. Forty dollars from a man on Route 9. I'm going to keep taking her nine-thirty phone calls until one of us dies.
The Sunday before the shower, I took Joyce.
I asked first, which was the whole of my contribution.
On the Thursday I said, "I've got Sunday free, what do you want me to take," and my wife looked at me for a second like she was checking a label for something.
Then she said, "Take my mother. Eight o'clock, the organizer's on the counter in the shoebox, and she'll tell you she took Tuesday's already. "
"Did she take Tuesday's?"
"She has never once taken Tuesday's in her entire life," Kathy said. "Count it out in front of her."
So I sat in my mother-in-law's kitchen at eight in the morning on a Sunday with a nine-dollar piece of plastic, four rows of seven, eight prescription bottles, and a woman with half a face telling me I was doing it wrong.
"Kathy does it in the other direction."
"Joyce, it's a grid."
"She goes down. You're going across."
"How is that different?"
"Down is Monday to Sunday. Across is a week of the same pill." She shifted her cup to a better angle. "You'll put her in the hospital."
"Joyce, I've got the bottles right here."
"Ask her," Joyce said. So I did, when I got home. She does go down. I've gone down ever since.
It took me forty minutes, because I counted everything twice.
Twenty-two of those minutes were the blue one, which my mother-in-law does not want and has views about.
By the time I got out of there I'd swept a floor, changed a hall bulb she'd been complaining about since Wednesday, and heard a story about 1974.
Forty minutes, a bulb, a floor.
My wife has done that fifty-one Sundays out of fifty-two for a year, on the back of a twelve-hour shift, and the family took the fact of it and turned it into a reason she couldn't come to her daughter's wedding.
I got home at ten. Kathy was asleep, and she slept until two.
The slip happened the first week of December, in my own kitchen, in front of my wife.
Bree was over. She'd brought her laundry, which is her tax on us, and she was up on the counter with her heels knocking the cabinet the way she's done since she was eleven, and we were talking about the tasting in March.
"So Lauren already asked Aunt Mon to the tasting," she said, "which, fine, whatever, except now Aunt Mon's calling me about it instead of going.
She keeps saying she doesn't want to come if Kathy's only being polite.
Like four times. She said, I'd rather know.
And then she asked me if I thought Kathy actually?—"
"I'll just tell Mon that Kathy?—"
I stopped.
I heard it come out of my own mouth. Present tense, easy as breathing, the first six words of a twenty-year habit, in a kitchen where my wife was standing at the sink with her back to me rinsing a colander.
Kathy didn't turn around. She went absolutely still, which is worse.
"Scratch that," I said. "I'll ask Kathy. She'll tell you herself."
Bree's heels stopped knocking the cabinet.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
Kathy turned the water off, dried her hands on the towel, slowly, and turned around and looked at me for about three seconds.
"Don't answer that one either," she said to Bree. "Not even if you're sure. Especially not if you're sure."
"So what do I tell her?"
"Tell her to call me."
Bree's eyebrows went up. "Is that going to go okay?"
"I have no idea," Kathy said. "But it'll be her and me on the phone, which is about nineteen years overdue." She hung the towel on the oven handle. "March seventh. I'm off. I'll be at the tasting."
I stood there with a dish towel in my hand and my whole chest going. My wife had just handed my sister a door, six weeks after the worst morning of my life in that same kitchen, and she'd done it in the flattest voice you ever heard, like a woman reading off a chart.
Bree left with her laundry. Kathy went upstairs to sleep before a three-to-eleven, and I stood in the kitchen making a list in my head, which is what I'm like. I'm not going to be a different man at fifty-one; the difference has to be in what the list says.
The list said: take her mother's Sunday in two weeks so she can sleep. Ask first. Don't book anything.
The list said: fill the organizer, count the blue one out loud twice.
The list said: the box.
I drove over on the twelfth of December, a Saturday morning. She's kept a key under the same fake rock since 2009, which I've told her about twice, and I rang the bell.
The box was still on the counter at the end by the toaster — forty-nine envelopes in my sister's beautiful hand, addressed to a shower that had already happened.
Fifty-eight days it had been there. Kathy had been in that kitchen twice since, once to drop off a casserole dish and once for ten minutes on a Sunday.
Both times I'd watched my wife's eyes go to that box and come away again without a word.
Monica made coffee neither of us drank, and we talked about the gutter, and then I said it.
"Do you want me to take the box?"
She didn't answer. She looked at it on the counter the way you look at a thing you've been walking past for two months.
"Take it where?"
"My truck. Then the dumpster behind the gym at school."
"The dumpster," she said.
"Or I put it back down and we never mention it again. Either one, Mon. You tell me."
My sister stood there with her hands on the edge of the counter for long enough that I started to think of something to say and then didn't. Then she picked the box up with both hands, the way she carries a casserole, and held it out to me.
"Take it," she said. "I've moved it forty times."
I put it in the bed of my truck, drove to the school and dropped the whole thing in the dumpster behind the gym, because there isn't a recycling bin at my house big enough to hold it without Kathy seeing it in there on a Tuesday.
Monica called me that night at nine-thirty.
"Did you do it?"
"I did."
"Those cost me a hundred and ten dollars."
"The ones you mailed cost you that," I said. "Mon, do you want them back? I'll tell you where they are. I'll go get them right now."
There was a long pause on my sister's end, and then a sound I couldn't place at first. It was her laughing, one short breath, at ten o'clock at night in her kitchen with the feeder full outside the window.
"No," she said. "No, I don't want them back."