Chapter 10
PATTY
Idid not decide to skip it. By the Wednesday before, I'd gotten most of the way there without ever once making a decision, and it went like this.
Wednesday I thought: the gym will be crowded.
Thursday I thought: Rose will be there, and Rose deserves a clean morning with her grandson without me standing eight feet off making it complicated for everybody.
Friday I thought: it's a first-grade thing, twenty kids, forty adults, one hour, and nobody's going to notice a difference.
Saturday I looked at the calendar on the side of the refrigerator where I'd written GRANDPARENTS DAY 9:30 in the tenth's square four weeks earlier, in blue, and I thought: I could just work.
That's arithmetic I've been running since 2013, and that week I ran it without once noticing I was doing it. If I'm not there, the room is simple. The room is simple, so nobody has to do anything with their face. Nobody has to look at the nametag. There is no nametag.
I've done this my whole married life. It has a rhythm to it, and that fall I could hear the rhythm the way you hear a song you're sick of.
Christmas Eve at Emily's in 2019, when the seats ran out and I said I'd rather stand, then stood.
Maddie's baptism, when I said I'd hold the coats.
The hospital in 2013, when I said I don't want to crowd you and then sat on the edge of a chair for two hours with flowers in my lap because there was nowhere to put them down.
Nobody in fifteen years ever put a hand on my chest at a doorway. I walked myself out, politely, in advance, so that nobody else would have to, then I told myself it had been my idea.
Monday I mentioned to Denise that I might be around Friday morning after all.
"I thought you had the school thing."
"There's a lot of family going."
She took her glasses off. She's sixty-one, she's been doing this job since before the computers, and she does not miss much. "Uh-huh," she said, put them back on, and let it go, which is why I have never once resented owing her.
Tuesday, Jack asked what time we were leaving Friday.
"I don't know if I'm going."
He was making the coffee, and he stopped with the filter in his hand.
He did not say of course you're going. He did not say don't be like that. He did not tell me what I felt, or argue me out of it, or offer to fix it, or start making calls.
He said, "Okay." Then he put the filter in and measured the coffee. "For what it's worth, I'd like it if you came."
"Noted."
"That's all I'm going to say about it."
"Good."
"It was hard not to say more."
"I could tell," I said, and he almost smiled at the counter. Then he put the lid on the canister wrong, and I fixed it after he went up.
Wednesday I picked Noah up as usual. He got in, got buckled, told me about a boy named Bo who'd eaten a crayon on purpose, then somewhere around the dead tree he said, "Grandma Pat, what snack are you bringing?"
"To what?"
"To the grandparents thing."
I looked at him in the mirror. He was more or less upside down in the booster seat, head against the belt, feet up on the back of the passenger seat where I have told him three hundred times not to put them.
"There's pastries there," I said. "The school does the food."
"But everyone's grandma brings a snack."
"That's not true."
"Bo's grandma is bringing brownies."
"Bo's grandma is showing off."
He thought that was extremely funny and laughed the fake laugh he does when he knows a thing is a joke without knowing why, then he said, "So what are you bringing?"
Not are you coming.
There it was, sitting in the back of my Corolla with its shoes on my upholstery. He hadn't spent one second of his life wondering whether I was going to be at his Grandparents Day. The only open question in his mind was the snack, and I had to look at the road for a minute.
"What do you want me to bring?"
"The cookies with the M&M's."
"Those aren't allowed. Tessa."
"Oh yeah." He accepted it instantly, the way he has his whole school life. "The other cookies."
"The oatmeal ones."
"Yeah, but not the raisins."
"The oatmeal ones without raisins are just cookies, Noah."
"Yeah," he said. "Those."
I made four dozen on Thursday night, the way I make them, which takes longer than it should because I chill the dough twenty minutes so they don't spread.
I burned the first tray. I've burned the first tray of every batch I've made since 1994, because I refuse to accept that my oven runs hot on the top rack.
Maddie called at eight while the second tray was in. She calls me on Thursdays sometimes, from her room, mostly about nothing.
"What are you doing?"
"Cookies for Noah's thing."
"Ugh, Grandparents Day. They stopped doing it after fourth grade."
"Did you like it?"
"It was okay." A pause, and the sound of her flopping over on the bed. "Grandma Rose came to mine in third. And then you came in fourth, remember, because she had the thing with her shoulder."
"I remember."
"You brought the lemon ones."
"You remember the cookies."
"Patty," she said, in the voice of a twelve-year-old who has grown tired of an adult, "I remember everything."
"Is your homework done?"
"Is that why you think I called?"
"No."
"It's half done," she said, and hung up on me, which from Maddie is affectionate.
Jack came into the kitchen at nine, saw the racks on the counter, and did not say a single word about it. I have been married to him long enough to know exactly what that cost him.
Friday morning I put on the green sweater.
Then I took it off and put on the grey one, because the green one has always been a little much.
Then I put the green one back on, because it's the one Noah calls the pickle sweater, and I did not want to explain to a first grader why I wasn't wearing the pickle sweater.
There was a spot on the cuff and I got most of it with a wet thumb.
Jack wore a collared shirt. He shaved.
"You look nice," I said.
"So do you."
"Don't be weird about it."
"I'm not being weird. It's a compliment."
"It's nine in the morning at an elementary school."
"You can still look nice at an elementary school."
"Nobody has ever looked nice at an elementary school."
In the car I had the cookie tin on my lap, because there was nowhere else for it. Then I noticed I was holding it the way I'd held those flowers in 2013. I put it on the floor by my feet on purpose.
"You've got the tin on the floor," Jack said.
"It's fine."
"It'll slide."
"Then it slides."
We got there at nine twenty-five. Rose's car was already in the lot, the blue Escape with the dealership frame and the animal shelter magnet on the back.
She was out of it near the doors with a travel mug, in a nice jacket, hair done.
She's fifty-nine and has always been better at clothes than I am.
"Patty!" She waved, a real one, the whole arm. "You made cookies. Look at that."
"They're just oatmeal."
"You made four dozen cookies for a school. That's not just anything." She said it warmly, and she meant it, which is the thing about Rose I have never been able to explain to anybody who wanted me to have a villain. "Jack, you shaved."
"I shave."
"You shave in April."
"You parked way out here?" she said. "There's a whole row by the flagpole."
"I like this one."
"It's a hike."
"It's forty feet, Rose."
"In heels it's a mile."
"You're in flats."
"I'm speaking generally," she said.
The cafeteria was too warm. They'd done it up nice — folding tables with paper cloths, a coffee urn, a tray of danish, plus a long table by the door with the nametags laid out in rows.
That's where the hitch was.
They were in alphabetical order by student. NOAH C. had a card with a bee on it and, under the bee, three names.
GRANDPA JACK.
GRANDMA ROSE.
PATTY.
Three tags in a row, the third one shorter than the other two.
Rose picked hers up and stuck it on without looking at the row. Jack picked his up. I picked mine up and put it on my sweater. It was completely fine — a sticker with my name on it, which is the correct information, which is what a nametag is for.
Jack didn't look at me. I watched for it.
He didn't check how I was taking it. He didn't do the small apologetic face.
He took his tag, put it on crooked, and went to get a coffee he didn't want.
That was the most he could do for me in that room, because the other thing he could have done was fix it.
He could have gone up to Ms. Ocampo at the urn and had a quiet word.
She'd have written a new one on a blank in marker, and I'd have stood in a school cafeteria wearing a sticker my husband arranged for me.
I'd have taken it off in the car, and he knew that.
Rose put her mug down on the table next to my tin. "Did Emily tell you they're doing the reading buddies again?" she said. "Noah's got a fourth grader. He talks about him like he's the president."
"Marcus."
"Marcus. That's it." She shook her head. "I can never keep them."
"Bo. Tessa. Delia. Priya."
"Stop."
"Harper, Rafe, the other Noah."
"There's another Noah?"
"There's another Noah," I said. "He's taller."
I got my coat off. I put the cookies out on the tray with the little paper doilies they'd set out, and I arranged them, then unarranged them, because arranged cookies look like somebody trying.
Ms. Ocampo came by with the urn lid in her hand. "You brought cookies. Bless you. Bo's grandmother brought brownies and I've already had two."
"They're oatmeal."
"Even better. Then they're breakfast."
"There's no raisins in them."
"Then you're a hero," she said, already moving.
She said it easy. She had no idea she'd been in the middle of anything four weeks ago. For her it was a name on a clipboard.
The kids came in at nine forty in a line, holding a rope with knots on it, which is apparently how first graders travel. Noah spotted us from twenty feet off and did a thing with his whole body, a kind of full-torso wave. Ms. Ocampo put a hand on his shoulder to keep him in the line.
"We're going to go around," she called out over the noise. "Everybody sit with your grown-ups, then we'll do introductions. Noah, honey, hang on. Hang on."
He hung on about four seconds.
I got my hands around my coffee cup.