Chapter 6
PATTY
The chair was blue and too low. Her living room had the after-school wreckage all through it — Noah's backpack open on the floor with everything spilling out sideways, Maddie's flute case on the couch, a plate.
"It's too low," I said.
"It's a reading chair."
"For who?"
"For me. Hypothetically. In a life where I read."
"Do you read?"
"I have a stack."
"A stack isn't reading, Emily."
"It's a hundred and ten dollars."
"For a chair."
"For a whole chair."
"It's low, Emily."
"You keep saying low like it's a diagnosis." She sat down in it to prove something and her knees came up around her like a woman being swallowed. "Okay. It's low." Getting out of it took her two tries.
"There's a good one at the place on Hansen."
"The place on Hansen is four hundred dollars."
"There's a good one there for one ninety. The green one, in the back, with the wood arms." I didn't have to think about it. "It's been there since February. They'll take one fifty."
She looked at me from inside the blue chair. "How do you know that?"
"Because I looked."
"When?"
"When I was in there about the lamp. Twice."
"You bought a lamp?"
"I did not buy a lamp," I said. "I looked at a lamp. Twice."
She made coffee. Noah was at the table doing a worksheet about the letter Q with the specific fury of a boy who's been told he can go outside when it's finished. Maddie was upstairs behind a shut door, which is where she lives now.
"Okay," Emily said, sitting down across from me. "You have a face."
"I don't have a face."
"You've had a face since you walked in. Is it Dad? Is he sick?"
"He's not sick."
"Because he would absolutely not tell me."
"He's not sick. Emily." I turned the mug around on the table. "Can I ask you something a little strange?"
"Now I'm scared."
"It's not scary. It's — " I looked over at Noah, who was on his fourth Q, not listening, and lowered my voice anyway. "What do you want the kids to call me?"
She blinked. "What?"
"It's a real question."
"What do you mean, what do I want them to call you? They call you Patty."
"I know. I'm asking if that's what you want."
She set her mug down. She has her father's face when she's confused; the eyebrows do the exact same thing. "I want them to call you whatever they call you. That's — Patty, that's not a thing I've ever had an opinion about. Why would I have an opinion about that?"
"Some people do."
"Some people are insane. A woman at my office made everybody vote on what her grandbaby would call her. There was a text thread." She pulled a leg up under her. "Where is this coming from? You're doing the face again."
"How do you spell quiet," Noah said, not looking up.
"Q-U-I-E-T."
"That's not how it sounds."
"No," Emily said. "It isn't."
I hadn't decided how far I was going to go with it. In the car I'd told myself I'd ask the one question and leave. But she was looking at me the way she does, straight on, and I have never once managed to be strategic at close range.
"Last week at pickup," I said, "Ms. Ocampo was doing the Grandparents Day nametags. She said Grandma Patty. And your father told her, actually, she's just Patty."
Emily didn't say anything.
"I'm not telling you that to get him in trouble."
"No, I — " She stopped and started again. "He said just Patty?"
"Yes."
"Huh."
Something went across her face, and it wasn't defensiveness. It was closer to a woman doing math on a receipt.
"Emily. Has he ever told you I preferred it?"
"Preferred — "
"Being called Patty. By them."
She was quiet a second. "Not in — " She frowned. "Not in a sentence. Not like sitting me down."
"Then how?"
"He just — " She made a small flicking motion with her hand. "He was always really on top of it. Like if Maddie said Grandma he'd go, Patty, honey. Right away. Every time. And I remember thinking, okay, so that's how it is over there."
"Over there."
"In your house. Like, that's the rule at Dad's and I'm not going to be the one to mess with it.
" She was talking faster now. "Honestly?
I thought it was you. I thought maybe you'd told him you weren't comfortable with it and he was covering for you so you didn't have to be the one correcting a kid. That's such a Dad thing."
I put my hands around the mug, because they'd gone cold. "I never told him that."
She stared at me. "Ever?"
"I told him one thing, one time, in 2013, in a car, coming home from the hospital when Maddie was a day old. I said I don't want to step on your mother. And I meant it. She'd just — " I stopped. "It was the right thing to say that week."
"That week."
"That week."
"And then nobody ever — " She put both hands flat on the table. "Twelve years?"
"Around twelve."
"Oh, my God."
"Emily — "
"No, hang on." She stood up, went to the counter, stood there with her back to me a second, then turned around. "There's a card. Do you remember, Maddie made you a card, she must have been in fourth grade — "
Every hair on my arms came up. "I remember the card."
"He crossed it out."
"I know."
"I saw him do it." Her voice climbed. "I was in the other room.
He did it at the counter. I thought — " She shook her head.
"I thought, okay, so this must be a real boundary, because he's doing that to his own granddaughter's card, so it must be important to Patty.
There's more. Now that I'm — God. The pediatrician.
When Noah had the croup the intake lady put you down as grandmother on the wristband thing, the visitor sticker, and Dad went back up to the desk about it.
I thought he was getting parking validated. "
"I remember the sticker. It was yellow."
"Do you remember what it said?"
"It said family friend," I said. "I wore it for two days."
I kept it in my coat pocket about a week after that. Then I threw it out.
Noah looked up from the letter Q. "Mom?"
"You're fine, bud. Finish your page."
He went back to it. Maddie came down for a yogurt, took it without a word to either of us, went back up, and the door shut.
Emily sat down again and pushed her hair off her face with both hands, holding it there. There was a smear of marker on the inside of her wrist.
"I have introduced you as my dad's wife," she said. "At Maddie's band thing. To a whole row of people. Because I genuinely thought that was what you wanted."
"You didn't do anything wrong."
"That is the most infuriating thing you could possibly say to me right now."
"It's still true."
"You always do that." She wiped her face again, angrier about the crying than anything else. "Somebody hurts you and you hand them a way out of it before they've even finished."
"That's a habit."
"It's a bad one."
"It's kept the peace in this family for fifteen years."
"Has it?" Emily said, and I didn't answer that. "I didn't do anything at all, which is — " She let go of her hair. "You sat up with Noah's ear. You know Tessa's allergy. My own mother doesn't know Tessa's allergy, and I love my mother."
"Don't do that."
"I'm not doing a competition. I'm saying my mother is Grandma Rose and she's great at it.
She takes them to the movies, she buys them stuff I said no to, that's her thing, that's totally her thing.
" Her eyes were wet, which I hadn't wanted.
"And you're the one who knows what the school nurse's voice sounds like. "
"Emily."
"What do I call you."
"Nothing," I said. "You call me Patty. That's my name, you were twenty-one when we met, I'm not asking a grown woman to change what she calls me."
"Okay."
"That is genuinely not what this is."
"Okay." She wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand. "Then what is it?"
I couldn't answer that in her kitchen with her son eight feet away.
"Is he going to be okay?" she said. "That's a stupid question. I'm asking it anyway."
"He's going to be fine."
"Are you?"
"I've been fine for fifteen years," I said. "Apparently I'm very good at it."
Emily didn't laugh.
Noah pushed the worksheet across the table without getting out of his chair. "Done."
She looked at it. "That's a W, bud."
"It's a Q."
"Look at it."
He took it back.
"I need to talk to your father," I said.
"You're going to talk to him."
"I am."
"Because I'm about to talk to him."
"That's up to you."
"Patty."
"It is." I stood up and rinsed my mug, because I cannot leave a cup in a sink. "You're allowed to talk to your own dad about your own kids."
She walked me out. The storm door has a crack across the bottom pane that Dan has been meaning to get to since spring. On the porch, with the door half open behind her and the TV going somewhere inside, she caught my sleeve.
"For the record," she said. "For whatever it's worth right now, which is probably nothing."
"What."
"When Noah was in the hospital that time with the croup — remember, they kept him overnight for the oxygen thing?"
"I remember."
"The intake lady asked who the woman in the hall was." Her mouth did something complicated. "And I said that's his grandma."
"Emily."
"I did. I said it fast and I didn't think about it. And then afterward I thought, I hope nobody tells Dad." She let go of my sleeve. "That's what I want you to sit with. Not that I said it. That I was relieved he didn't hear me."
A car went past with its headlights on. It was four thirty and the light was already going out of the day.
"Go get the green one," I said.
"What?"
"On Hansen. Before somebody else does."
Emily laughed, one breath, wet.
I drove home the long way, past the car wash with the flags, and never turned the radio on.
She'd been managing me. That was the part I kept picking back up — for years, carefully, kindly, the way you handle somebody with a bad back, no offer to help lift because the offer would embarrass them.
She introduced me as her dad's wife at a band concert on purpose, and she felt good about it afterward, because she thought she'd gotten it right.
I pulled into my own driveway and sat there a minute before I went in.