Chapter 15
KATHY
The second Sunday in December I was off, my mother's organizer was already filled, and there were nine people coming for pancakes.
Nine is what it comes to now. Neil, me. Adam, who brings nothing and eats for two. Bree, who brings orange juice and takes home leftovers. Lauren and Sam. My mother, who Rhonda drives over, and Rhonda, who stays. Sam's brother came once and now he just comes.
I did the pills at my mother's on Saturday this week instead, because Sunday was going to be busy. Four rows of seven, the lids snapping, the blue one counted out loud twice while she watched me from the recliner and told me she'd already taken Tuesday's, which she had not.
"Your girl's got a dress," she said.
"She's got a dress."
"Rhonda says you did her hair."
"I did her hair."
"Hmph," my mother said, which in her language is a standing ovation. Then, after a minute, with her eyes on the television: "Neil did the pills wrong."
"He did them across."
"I told him."
"He goes down now."
"Well." She shifted the cup to a better angle. "He asked me what I wanted for Christmas. He never asks. He just gets the lotion."
"What did you say?"
"I said a shower chair," my mother said, with enormous dignity. "The one with the arms."
"Ma."
"I'm sixty-nine years old and I'm tired of standing up in there like a heron." She waved the good hand. "Take the recycling out. There's a bag in the mudroom, don't look in it."
Neil did the griddle Sunday, which is new.
He's been on the griddle since the last Sunday in November and he's not good at it — he flips too early, he can't leave them alone — but he does the whole thing, start to finish, while I sit down.
That was the trade, and I didn't ask for it.
He asked me what I wanted, in November, at this table, with a pen, and I said I wanted to sit down on a Sunday.
He said, okay, then I've got the griddle, you've got the chair.
It took me until about the third Sunday to stop getting up.
The kitchen was loud, the way it is every Sunday now.
Adam had the game on in the other room at a volume that has been discussed.
My mother sat at the end in the chair with the good back support, holding her coffee with her right hand, telling Rhonda a story about 1974 that Rhonda has heard.
Bree and Sam were arguing about whether you can put blueberries in the batter, which you can, and Sam is wrong.
"You cannot put the blueberries in the batter," Sam said. "They go gray. The whole thing goes gray."
"They don't go gray, they go purple," Bree said. "Purple is a color."
"Kathy. Tell him."
"They go in the batter."
"Thank you."
"They've gone in the batter since 2003," I said. "The gray ones are the frozen ones, and you didn't buy frozen ones, because I sent you to the store."
"I bought the frozen ones," Sam said.
Neil turned around from the griddle with the spatula up. "He bought the frozen ones."
"Then they'll be gray," I said, "and we'll eat them."
"See," Rhonda said from the end of the table, "this is the most functional this family's been in six months."
That got a laugh out of four people and a look from me, and my sister drank her coffee with her eyebrows up, unbothered, because she has never once regretted a sentence.
Lauren came in late, at eleven, with her hair wet from the shower at Sam's, and sat down in the chair next to mine with a plate she didn't put anything on yet.
She had a hair tie on her wrist. She pulled it off, pushed the whole wet mass of it over one shoulder, and turned her back a little toward me in the chair, which is the oldest signal in my life.
I didn't say anything about it. I put my coffee down, turned sideways, and did the plait.
It's harder wet, so it takes longer. Nobody at the table looked up.
Adam was arguing about the game with the television, my mother was telling Rhonda about 1974, Neil was burning the first four.
I sat there for twelve minutes doing my twenty-six-year-old daughter's hair at a kitchen table with everybody talking over each other, and it was not an event.
"Too tight," she said.
"It has to be tight, it's wet."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
"Mom, my whole forehead's going backwards."
I loosened it half an inch above her ear, which is all she ever actually wants. She pulled her plate over and started eating with her head still tipped back into my hands. Halfway down I ran out of hair tie, and Bree threw me one from across the table without being asked, underhand, a good throw.
The recipe's off the back of a box that doesn't exist anymore. Flour, an egg, buttermilk if there is any, more vanilla than anybody would tell you to use. I've made it in an apartment over a dry cleaner for two people and I've made it in this kitchen for nine, and it's the same batter.
On the refrigerator, dead center, where the takeout menus used to be, there's a paper calendar from the drugstore with two people's handwriting on it.
February and April have fittings. March seventh is the tasting, with three names next to it.
May has a Saturday marked hair practice.
June has a Saturday circled twice with a little drawing of a box with a ribbon on it, done in ballpoint by a twenty-six-year-old, and under that, in the same hand, hair — Mom.
Monica wasn't there. Monica's Sundays are her own.
As I understand it, from Bree, who gets the calls, she's deep into something for a woman at her church whose daughter is having a baby in February.
There's a theme. There are going to be paper flowers made by hand, sixty of them.
She asked Lauren, out loud, in her own voice, whether she could handle the favors for the June wedding, and Lauren said yes.
Everybody knows about it, and it's on that calendar in Lauren's handwriting: favors — Aunt Mon.
I don't think she thinks there's anything to be sorry for. She texted me a picture of the paper flowers last week and I texted back that they were beautiful, because they were.
She called me directly on Friday, the first time since October.
Eleven minutes. She wanted to know whether I thought sixty was too many paper flowers for a room that size, and whether my mother could manage a folding chair in June.
She didn't ask me one single question about how tired I was.
I noticed. It may have been on purpose, and I'll never know.
"Aunt Mon wants to know if Grandma can do stairs," Bree said around noon, with her mouth full. "For the flower lady's place. There's three steps and no rail."
"Tell her no. Tell her the flower lady can come to Grandma, or Grandma sees pictures."
"She said to ask you, not Dad." Bree said it lightly, but she looked at me when she said it. "She made a whole point of it. She was like, ask Kathy."
At the griddle Neil didn't turn around, and he kept flipping too early, but I watched the back of his neck go red the way it does. Eleven nights on a phone in a garage, saying the same nine words to his own family. I let myself have that for a second.
"Then that's how it's going to be," I said. "Tell her I'll call her Tuesday about the chair."
"You're going to call her."
"I'm going to call her. Eat your pancake."
Around two, Lauren started gathering her things, which takes her twenty minutes, because she has to find everything twice.
"Ma," she said — she calls me Ma when she wants something, which she picked up from my mother — "come here a second."
She was standing in the hall by the coats with her hair down. She gathered it up in one hand off her neck and looked at me.
"The morning of. You'll do it? For real, the real thing, not the practice one?"
"I'll do it."
"Because it takes like fifteen minutes, and there's going to be photographers, Sam's mom, nine hundred people. I need you to just?—"
"Lauren."
"What?"
"Yes," I said. "Ask me something hard."
She laughed. She kissed my cheek, said something about Tuesday, and took the leftover pancakes in a bag that belongs to us and will never come back.
Sam started the terrible truck. Adam and Bree left eleven minutes apart.
Rhonda took my mother home at four and called me at four-twenty to tell me the hall light was on again.
Neil scraped the griddle, which he also does badly. He stood there a long time with the scraper in his hand, at a stove in an empty kitchen, in a house where everybody had just left at the same time.
"I burned the first four," he said.
"You always burn the first four."
"I'm going to get it."
"You're not. Nobody does. That's why it's the first four."
"Your mother ate one."
"My mother eats the burned ones on purpose. She's been doing it since 1961 so nobody else has to."
"Huh," Neil said. He put the scraper down and looked at the griddle like it had said something to him.
Next Sunday I'll go over at eight, before anybody's up. I'll sit at my mother's kitchen table with the shoebox and the organizer. I'll snap twenty-eight lids. I'll count the blue one out loud twice.
Then I'll come home. The kitchen will smell like vanilla, because Neil will have started without me and it will be going wrong. My daughter's handwriting is on my refrigerator with a June Saturday circled twice.
I sit down in the chair. Somebody hands me a coffee. I take it.
THE END
Thank you for reading The Shower His Sister Threw.
Kathy and Neil’s story is about what can happen when love, family, and good intentions blur the lines around who gets to speak for whom—and what it takes to find your way back after that trust is broken.
If you enjoyed their story, I’d be grateful if you left a rating or review. Reviews help other readers find my books and mean more than you know.
Thank you for spending your time with this family.
— Vivian Chapel
OTHER WHEN HIS FAMILY CAME FIRST TITLES
The Apology His Mother Demanded
For sixteen years, Renata has hosted her husband’s family dinners, absorbed his mother’s insults, and kept the peace with a level face.
Then Coralie humiliates her at the annual memorial dinner — in front of the whole family, in front of Renata’s daughter, at Renata’s own table.
Renata finally says no.
By morning, the family wants an apology.
And her husband Mark asks her to give it.
Just apologize so they can move on.
But Renata is done being the road to everyone else’s peace. She stops smoothing, stops translating, stops absorbing the coldness his mother has aimed at her for years.
Then she discovers Mark already apologized to his mother.
In Renata’s name.
Now the crisis is bigger than one impossible mother-in-law. It is nineteen years of a husband choosing family peace over his wife’s dignity.
If Mark wants to save his marriage, he will have to stop managing the women in his life and finally stand where he should have stood all along.
Between his mother and his wife.
The Photo His Ex-Wife Framed
For eleven years, Marisol Vega has been the second wife who made everything easy.
She stayed quiet.
She stepped back.
She never made Ray’s children choose.
Then her stepdaughter gets married.
Marisol spends three months altering Noelle’s wedding dress, sewing love into every seam and hiding a secret pocket over the bride’s heart.
But when the family photos begin, Marisol is told to step aside.
Just family for this one.
Ray sees it happen. He sees his ex-wife remove Marisol from the frame. He sees his wife standing alone with two glasses of champagne.
And he stays where the list put him.
When the wedding announcement arrives, the truth is printed in four hundred mailboxes: Ray, his ex-wife, and their children under the oak tree.
The original family.
Marisol’s dress is there.
Marisol is not.
Now one photo exposes eleven years of quiet erasure — the “and guest” invitations, the holidays alone, the family trips she never knew about, and the husband who loved her every day while letting his ex-wife write her out of the record.
If Ray wants to save his marriage, he will have to do more than apologize.
He will have to face the family he has protected, stop letting his ex-wife control the story, and prove that Marisol is his wife in public, not just in private.
Because Marisol is done standing outside the frame.