Chapter 5
TOM
It started with the butter.
We were in the Giant Eagle on the eleventh, Cheryl pushing the cart, being useless on purpose in a way I was starting to find funny, and I dropped two pounds of butter in.
"That's not enough." It got out of her before she could stop it, and I watched her mouth close after it.
"It's for the potatoes. It's a stick and a half."
"It's not for the potatoes."
"Then what's it for?"
She kept pushing a few steps. Then she stopped and turned around and said it the way you'd read it off a page.
"Alma buys one pound of butter for Christmas, because she thinks a pound of butter is a lot of butter.
There'll be twenty-two people, four kinds of bread, and mashed potatoes she makes with milk.
By eleven-thirty somebody opens that fridge and says is there more butter, and the answer needs to be yes, or Denise drives to the Sheetz and misses her own ham coming out. "
I stood there in the dairy aisle.
"How long have you been buying extra butter?"
"I don't know. Fifteen years?"
"Does she know you do that?"
Cheryl looked at me a second with an expression I didn't care for.
"Tom," she said. "Nobody knows I do that."
I put four pounds in the cart.
"That's too much."
"You just told me two wasn't enough."
"Two isn't. Four's a statement." She got the cart moving again. "Three."
I took one out. She didn't say another word about it, and she didn't put it back on the shelf either, so I did that. By the time I caught her up she was at the end of the aisle looking at coffee she had no intention of buying.
Then it was the gluten thing. Denise's oldest, Brayden, got diagnosed celiac at eleven, four years back.
Every Christmas there's a pan of those brownies from the yellow box on the sideboard, and every Christmas that kid eats them, and I'd honestly always figured his mother brought them.
She doesn't. Denise brings ham. Cheryl's bought that box every year since 2021, made them the night before, and set them out without a label on them, because by fourteen he didn't want a special plate with his name on it.
"How do you even know that?"
"Because when he was eleven he told me he hated being the reason there was a separate table."
I heard it. I didn't have one thing to say back.
Then it was the containers, because Grandma sends everybody home with leftovers, which everybody loves, and which takes about thirty pieces of Tupperware that do not exist in that house. I found the sleeve of them in the trunk of the Rogue on the tenth, hunting for the jack.
"What are these?"
"Containers."
"For what?"
"For the leftovers, Tom."
"There's a hundred of them in here."
"Eighty. They're twelve dollars at the restaurant supply on Ohio Street." She had her coat half off. "Put them back where they were, I need them on the twenty-fifth."
Then it was the spoons — Grandma's got six serving spoons for eleven dishes.
Then I got one wrong.
There's a bowl of those soft peppermints out at Grandma's every Christmas, in the milk-glass dish on the end table, and by that point I'd decided everything in that house came out of my wife's trunk.
So I bought two bags at the Rite Aid on Freeport Road and felt good about myself all the way to the truck.
They're Grandma's. She's put them out since 1981.
Marlene told me so on the phone in the voice of a woman explaining something everybody already knows, and I sat there with four dollars of peppermints in my console like a man who'd shown up to a job with the wrong prints.
I ate two of them at the light on Freeport and threw the bags in with the napkins.
Three weeks earlier I'd have told anybody who asked that my wife brought a casserole.
Now I'd swung the other way and decided she stocked the house.
Neither one of those had cost me a minute of actually looking.
Then it was Pauline's cushion. Her hips are shot, and there's a firm square pillow that shows up on her chair every year, and it lives in our hall closet the other three hundred sixty-four days.
None of it was hard. I run crews of eleven men. I can order material for a hospital wing. Half that list was easier than a Tuesday. I'd eaten Christmas dinner in that house fifty-some times, and not one time had I known any of it was going on.
Then it was Marlene, and I only got that one by accident, calling my aunt about the deviled eggs.
"You're doing the eggs?"
"No, you're doing the eggs. I'm asking what time you're bringing them."
"Whenever Cheryl gets me," Marlene said.
I was standing in the open door of my truck with one foot on the ground.
"Gets you?"
"She picks me up. I don't drive out to Sarver in the dark anymore, Tommy, my eyes are shot. She comes at one and runs me home after." A pause. "Well. She has. Is that changing?"
"No. No, that's not changing. I'll come get you."
"You will?"
"One o'clock."
"Cheryl brings the peppermints," Marlene said, which I took as a note.
"Anything else?"
"What do you mean, anything else?"
"I mean is there anything else she does that I'm supposed to be doing."
The pause on my aunt's end went on long enough that I could hear her television.
"Well, I don't know, Tommy. I'd have to think about it."
"Think about it."
"I don't keep a list."
"No," I said. "Nobody does."
I sat in that lot a minute after we hung up.
Eleven years, minimum. Probably more. My aunt Marlene, my father's sister, my own blood, had been getting hauled to and from every holiday for over a decade by my wife.
I'd ridden in that car and never once wondered why we were going the long way around by Sarver.
On the fourteenth I found Cheryl at the kitchen table paying bills and sat down across from her.
"How much more is there?"
"More what?"
"You know what." I had a pen in my hand out of habit with no paper under it. "Butter. Brownies. Containers. Marlene. Pauline's pillow. Give me the rest and I'll get it done."
She looked up from the checkbook.
"There isn't a rest."
"Cheryl."
"I'm not keeping it from you." She set the pen down. "There's no page anywhere with it written on it. If you sat me here right now and made me say all of it, I couldn't. I'd get most of the way, and then on the twenty-fourth I'd walk past the hall closet and remember the pillow."
"So how do you?—"
"I get there and I look at the room." She said it like it was the plainest thing going, which to her it is.
"The thermometer's dead, so I bring batteries next time.
Pauline's sliding down in a chair, so there's a pillow.
It isn't a system, Tom. It's paying attention in the same house for twenty-five years. "
I sat there with a pen and nothing to write on.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?"
"Nobody told me either. I noticed."
No heat in it at all. She went back to the checkbook.
The furnace came on. Out front, somebody's dog was losing its mind over a delivery.
And then I opened my mouth.
"Let me talk to Grandma."
Cheryl went still.
"About the table. About Christmas. I'll go over there, I'll sit down with her, I'll tell her that after twenty-five years my wife ought to be at the main table.
She won't love it. She'll have her back up about a week.
But she's not going to fight me on it, Cher, I'm the one she listens to. I'll get you a seat."
It felt good coming out. Like a man who's finally found the fault and priced the job.
Cheryl put her pen down on the checkbook.
"No," she said.
"No?"
"No."
"Cheryl, that's — that's the whole thing. That's what you've been?—"
"It isn't." She was looking right at me. "You just said I'll get you a seat. Do you hear that? Get me one. Like a permit."
"You know what I meant."
"I know exactly what you meant, and that's what's killing me.
" She pushed the checkbook away. "You're going to drive over to your grandmother's house, without me, and make a case for me, and she's going to consider it.
And at the end of that, one of two things happens.
Either she says no. Or she says yes, and on Christmas Day I walk into that dining room and sit down in a chair your ninety-seven-year-old grandmother has agreed to let me have. "
"You'd be at the table."
"I'd be at the table on approval." Her voice cracked a little on the last word — first crack I'd heard out of her in three weeks. She stopped, took one breath through her nose, got it back. "Tom. I'm not applying for membership in your family."
"That's not?—"
"It's exactly that. You want to file it on my behalf, because you're a decent man, and because you think what I want is a better chair.
" She got up and carried her mug to the sink, and stood there with her back to me.
"I have a chair. I've had one for twenty-five years. It's twelve feet from yours."
She got as far as the third stair.
"One more thing," she said, "and then I'm done tonight, because I'm tired and I've got a root canal at seven-forty."
"Go ahead."
"When you offered just now. Let me talk to Grandma." She had one hand on the rail. "How long did it take you to come up with that?"
"I don't know. Couple days."
"No, you don't understand what I'm asking." She came back down a stair. "How long from the second you decided the problem was real to the second you had a solution?"
I thought about it.
"Not long," I admitted.
"About a day?"
"About a day."
"Right. That's what you do. That's what I married." She was looking straight at me from the third stair in her socks. "Something's broke, you get the part, you fix it before dinner. It's why the sump pump works and my brakes work and Rachel got through college."
"That's not a criticism."
"It isn't. But you can't part-swap this one. There's nothing to order. There's no version where you go get a thing and bring it home and it's done Thursday."
Then she went up.
I sat at that table a long while. I'd come at her pleased with myself, a man who'd finally read the print, and the best I'd managed was to go ask my grandmother's permission to be married to my own wife in public. Whatever I'd offered her, Alma was still holding the pen.