Chapter 14
PATTY
Maddie turned twelve on the first Saturday in November.
Emily did it at their house, which is too small for it, which she does anyway.
Nine twelve-year-olds in the basement. Four adults in the kitchen.
Dan out on the back step working the grill in a coat, because Dan believes in November grilling, and Noah upstairs in the middle of everything wearing a paper crown he'd made for reasons nobody could determine.
I got there at noon to help set up, because Emily's kitchen is nine feet across and she will not admit it.
We did the folding table in the dining room.
We did the ice. I cut two hundred grapes off their stems, which is a job nobody assigns and everybody notices when it's not done.
Dan came through twice for things off the grill and left the door standing open both times.
"The door," Emily said.
"The door what."
"The door, Dan."
"It's forty degrees out there."
"That's the entire point of the door," she said.
Maddie came through twice herself to complain about the streamers, which she had asked for, and which were now babyish.
"You picked them," Emily said.
"In August."
"It's November."
"Exactly," Maddie said, and left.
Rose came at two with a bag from the mall that had something in it Emily had specifically asked her not to buy. It was a phone case with rhinestones on it. Maddie screamed. Emily looked at the ceiling.
Dan's parents came at two thirty. That's Ken and Marianne. They live ninety minutes out, they come to everything, they are lovely, and in eleven years they have never once successfully remembered anyone's name on the first try.
A few minutes later we were all in the kitchen, and Emily was doing the thing where she cuts a cake nobody wants yet, because it gives her hands something to do.
Marianne came in with her coat still on and did the whole circuit. "Emily, honey. Dan's outside freezing to death on purpose. Rose! Look at you."
"Marianne."
"You look wonderful. You do. Is that the coat from the — "
"It's the same coat. It's five years old."
"It's a wonderful coat." She turned. "And Jack, hello — "
"Marianne."
"And — "
And there it was. That little step off the curb, that half beat where a nice woman with her coat on works out that she has three adults in a kitchen and only two of them come with a card in her memory. The third is a woman she's met at eleven birthdays and could not tell you the arrangement of.
I took a breath in to speak. I had the sentence loaded.
It's a good sentence; I've had fifteen years to sand it down.
I'm Patty, I'm Jack's wife, we've met about nine hundred times, delivered light with a laugh on the end so the other person can laugh too, so we can all skate past the crack in the ice at speed.
My mouth was open. That's how close it was.
And Jack said, easy, reaching past me for a stack of napkins, "You know Patty. Noah's other grandmother."
He didn't stop moving. He said it the way you'd say the driveway's icy, then he handed Emily the napkins and asked her where the long lighter was, because the candles were the trick ones that don't light.
"Of course," Marianne said. "Of course. Patty. I'm terrible, I'm so sorry — "
"You're not terrible."
"I am. I've got a thing with names. Ken's the same."
"Ken called me Deborah in September," Rose said.
"He did do that. He does it to the mailman too."
I did not look at Rose. Looking would have been a question, and a question hands the moment to somebody else to rule on. So I didn't see her face. I only heard her, two seconds later, telling Marianne, "The junk drawer. It's always in the junk drawer, Em."
"It is not always in the junk drawer."
"It's in the junk drawer."
It was in the junk drawer.
I stood there with my hands on a bowl of grapes and let the kitchen go on around me. There was no rush to it. My eyes didn't sting. It was closer to standing on a bad ankle all day and finally sitting down — not pleasure, exactly. Just finding out how much I'd been bracing.
Marianne asked whether I'd made the potato thing. I said I had. She said she'd known, because nobody else makes it with the crumbs on top, then she asked me for the recipe for the eleventh time in eleven years.
And Emily did not object. That's the other thing. Emily was standing right there with a knife in a cake while her father called me her son's other grandmother in her kitchen, in front of her mother, in front of her in-laws. She went and got the lighter.
Much later, after the twelve-year-olds had been fed and released back into the basement, she found me on the stairs, where I'd gone to sit for four minutes with a plate.
"Scoot," she said. I scooted, and she sat down on the step below me with her back against the wall. "You okay?"
"I'm sitting on a stair."
"That's what I'm asking."
"There's nine children in this house."
"Eleven, if you count Dan and my brother-in-law." She picked something off her plate. "He said the thing."
"He did."
"I clocked it."
"Everybody clocked it except Marianne."
"Marianne is not a clocking person. Ken definitely didn't. Ken has been calling Dan's brother by the dog's name since 2018."
"That's not true."
"It's a little true. Ask him about it sometime, it's a whole bit." She scraped the last of the frosting off her plate with one finger. "How'd it feel?"
I thought about lying. I've told a great many small pleasant lies in fifteen years, most of them to keep somebody else comfortable.
"I almost stopped him."
"What?"
"I had my mouth open. I was going to do the joke."
"The Jack's-wife one."
"You know it?"
"Patty, I could recite it."
I laughed and had to put my hand over my plate. "I've been doing that since Maddie was born."
"I know."
"It's a good joke. It works."
"It's a great joke," Emily said. "It's the worst thing I've ever heard."
We sat there. Somebody downstairs screamed about a video game. Dan yelled something about the door.
"Can I tell you the part that got me?" I said.
"Yeah."
"He didn't look around first."
She turned her head.
"Fifteen years. Every time anything came near this, he'd do a sweep. He'd check where your mother was. He'd check your face. There's a thing he does with his shoulders, this little — " I made the motion.
"I've seen it."
"He didn't do it. He was reaching for napkins. He said it and he kept reaching."
Emily looked at her plate a second. "He asked me about it last week."
"Asked you what?"
"Whether I was okay with it. And I said, Dad, I've been okay with it since Maddie was little, you were the one running the — " She stopped. "Anyway. He didn't argue. He said okay. He said he wasn't going to bring it up again, because bringing it up again is the same problem."
"He said that?"
"Word for word. I wrote it down."
"You did not."
"I did. In my phone." She was smiling at her lap. "I don't know who that man is, but I like him."
"He's the same man."
"Don't defend him."
"I'm not defending him. I'm fifty-four, Emily, I'm not going to pretend I've been married to a stranger.
" I set my plate on the step beside me. "He's exactly the same.
He's a guy who cannot stand for anybody in a room to be uncomfortable.
That's the whole engine. It made him a good father, and it made him a good husband about eighty percent of the time.
The other twenty percent it made him do this. "
She thought about that. "That's very generous."
"It's not generous. It's just true." I picked the plate back up. "The generous version would be pretending the twenty percent didn't cost anything."
"Does he know it did?"
"He's starting to."
"Because I want him to know."
"He knows," I said. "You should hear how he does the pork chops."
"Bad?"
"Dry. Not a crime. Dry."
"They're always dry when he does them."
"He looked it up this time. He texted you about it."
"That was him?" She put her plate down on the step. "I thought that was a wrong number."
Rose came into the hall at the bottom of the stairs with her purse over her arm, looking for her keys, which were in her hand. "I'm going. Before the parents come. I hate the pickup part."
"You want cake to take?"
"God, no."
"Take cake."
"Emily."
"Take the cake, Mom."
Rose looked up the stairs at me. "Patty, tell her I don't want cake."
"She doesn't want cake," I said.
"Thank you."
Emily got up to wrap her some cake anyway. Rose stood there and let her, the way you do. At the door, with the cake in foil, she said to me, "He's got that concert thing in December. The winter one."
"The twelfth."
"Is it the twelfth?"
"It's the twelfth. It's on the school thing."
"See, I never look at the school thing." She shifted the cake to her other hand. "Okay. The twelfth."
She left, and the storm door banged the way it does.
Jack was in the dining room stacking folding chairs. He'd taken his shoes off at some point, which he does at Emily's, which nobody has ever asked him to do.
"Your mother wouldn't take cake," Emily told him.
"She never takes cake."
"She took cake."
"Then she'll throw it out in the car," he said, which is exactly what Rose does, which everybody in that house has known for thirty years.
Nothing happened. The world did not reorganize. Nobody got a new name, nobody lost one. Rose drove home with a plate of cake in foil on her passenger seat. Marianne told the story about Ken calling her Deborah four more times before Christmas. Emily went back to cutting a cake nobody wanted.
Noah came up the stairs later looking for a phone charger and found me still sitting there.
"Why are you on the stairs?"
"I'm resting."
"From what?"
"From the party."
He accepted that immediately, as a person who'd been in that basement three hours.
He sat down on the step below me where his mother had been, leaned back against my knees, told me at length about a game I did not understand, in which somebody named Kellan had done something unforgivable.
I put my hand on the top of his head and he let me.
Downstairs somebody put music on too loud.
Dan yelled about it, and the music got quieter.
The only thing that changed was that one man stopped talking.