Chapter 6
CHERYL
Rachel came home the third weekend in December, three days early, without much of an explanation.
She said her office had gone remote until January.
It wasn't that. She'd talked to her father and she'd talked to me, and she'd done the arithmetic adult children do when both their parents start using shorter sentences on the phone.
She got in Friday at eight — car door, boots on the porch, front door, and then, "It smells like a candle store in here."
"That's your father. He bought a Yankee Candle."
"Why?"
"He read that the house should smell like cinnamon."
"Read where?"
"I didn't ask."
She came into the kitchen still in her coat, twenty-nine years old, my nose and her father's height, and hugged me about four seconds longer than a normal hug lasts.
Tom went up at ten-thirty because he had a Saturday half-shift, and Rachel and I stayed at the kitchen table with the wine she'd brought, which was too nice for a Friday, picking at pretzels.
We didn't get to it for an hour. We talked about her building, which has a man on the second floor who does something with a hammer at eleven at night.
We talked about a girl she went to high school with who's getting married in Charleston in April.
It's going to cost Rachel about nine hundred dollars she doesn't want to spend on somebody she hasn't laid eyes on since 2019, and she's going to spend it anyway.
"Just don't go."
"I said yes in September."
"Say you're sick in April."
"Mom." She looked genuinely scandalized, which delighted me. "You can't do that."
"You can absolutely do that. I've done it twice."
"To who?"
"None of your business."
She laughed at that, and got up and got the pretzels, and put them in a bowl instead of leaving them in the bag.
That's a thing she got from me. Her father has never once done it in his life.
Then she sat back down and turned her glass a half turn on the table, and I knew we were finished with the wedding.
"So how bad is it," she said.
"It's not bad."
"Mom."
"It isn't bad. Nobody's yelling. Nobody's sleeping in the den." I turned my glass by the stem. "It's just quiet in a way it hasn't been."
She nodded. She has a way of nodding that means keep going.
"Has he said anything to you?"
"He called me Tuesday."
"About?"
"He asked what a normal amount of butter is." She said it flat. "That was the whole call. Four minutes. He goes, how much butter does a person need, and I go, for what, and he goes, never mind, and then he asked about my car."
I laughed before I could stop it. It came out wrong, more air than sound, and Rachel looked at me over the top of her glass and didn't laugh along.
"He's doing the Christmas stuff," I said. "All of it. He found the brownies for Brayden. He called Denise about the ham timing, which I don't believe he's done in his life."
"Is that good?"
"It's something."
"But."
I had to think about how to put it. "But I don't know yet whether he's fixing the thing or fixing the list. Anybody can do a list."
Rachel picked up a pretzel and didn't eat it.
"Can I say something and you not get mad."
"That's an alarming opener."
"I think I made it worse."
I set my glass down. "How would you have made this worse."
"Because I grew up in it." She turned the pretzel over in her fingers.
"I sat at that folding table with you until I was like twenty-two and I thought it was funny.
I made the jokes too. I called it the kids' table, Mom.
Out loud. For years. About my own mother.
" Her chin did the thing it's done since she was four.
"And then I moved, and I stopped going as much, and it just turned into a story I told about my weird family. "
"Rachel."
"No, because I knew it was messed up. I knew when I was a teenager. And I still let it be a bit."
"Stop." I put my hand flat on the table, which is a thing my own mother used to do, God help me.
"You were a child. You were at that table because you actually were a child, and by the time you were an adult, every person in that house — me included — had taught you it was a joke.
You don't get to carry this. It isn't yours. "
"It's a little bit mine."
"It's zero percent yours."
She wiped under her eye with the side of her hand, laughed at herself, drank some wine.
"Fine," she said. "Then I want to tell you something, and I don't know if it's going to help or make it worse."
"That's two alarming openers in ten minutes."
"I asked Dad about it once."
The refrigerator hummed.
"Asked him what."
"Why you didn't sit with him."
"When?"
"I was sixteen." It came fast, like she'd been holding it a while.
"It was Grandma Alma's birthday. Not Christmas — the one where they did the cake at the house because Uncle Mitch's restaurant thing fell through, so it was June, and it was the same setup, big table and card table.
You were at the card table with me and Brayden when he was still little.
Do you remember? You held him the whole meal because Denise's arm was in the sling. "
I did remember. I remembered the sling, and I remembered the cake was store-bought with too much shortening in the frosting.
"After," Rachel said, "we were leaving. You'd already gone out to the car with the leftovers. And I was mad. I don't even fully know why it was that night and not the other hundred nights, but I was sixteen and I was mad, and I said to Dad in the driveway, why doesn't Mom sit with you."
She stopped.
"What did he say."
Rachel looked at the table.
"He said, 'That's just Grandma.' And then he said, 'Don't start something.'"
Upstairs the pipes knocked, the way they do when Tom rolls over.
"Don't start something," I said.
"Yeah."
"He said that to you."
"Mom, I don't think he even remembers. Honestly. I don't think it registered as a thing that happened."
"That's worse."
"I know. That's why I never told you."
I sat with that a second. "Can I ask you something, and you have to be honest, because I've been sitting here trying to decide if I'm losing my mind."
"Okay."
"When you were a kid. Did it seem strange to you? At the time. Not looking back."
She took a minute with it. She's always been careful with questions like that, which she gets from neither of us.
"No. That's the horrible part. It was just where we ate.
Like how at Grandma Alma's you can't put your elbows on the walnut table but you can at the green one, or how the downstairs bathroom is for company.
" She turned her glass. "It's not that I thought it was fine.
I didn't think about it at all. It was furniture. "
"When did it stop being furniture?"
"Junior year. Ish." She looked at the ceiling. "I think I read something. Or somebody at school said something about their stepmom. And then I got in the car after a birthday and it was like somebody turned a light on in a room I'd been walking through my whole life."
"And you asked your father."
"And I asked my father."
I put my hand over hers on the table.
"You want to know what I keep getting stuck on? It isn't your father."
"Mom—"
"No, listen, because I've been chewing on this for three weeks and I'd rather say it once to you than never say it at all.
" The window over the sink had gone black with the porch light sitting in it.
"I used to notice. The first two, three years, I'd get in the car and my ears would be hot. And then I found the joke."
"The graduating thing."
"The graduating thing." I turned my glass.
"It worked so well, Rach. That's what nobody understands about it.
I'd say it and the whole room would let its shoulders down.
And I liked that. I liked being the one who could make a bad minute go away in four words.
So I did it every year, and I got fast at it, and then I got good at it, and somewhere in there I quit only protecting myself and started protecting everybody else from having to look at me.
" I set the glass down. "I didn't put myself at that table.
But I taught that entire family how not to see it.
Twenty-two years of teaching them. Your father was the best student in the room.
He wasn't the only one. I'm the one who wrote the lesson. "
"That's not fair to you."
"It's not a confession, honey. Nobody gets absolved." I could hear how flat my own voice had gone. "It just happens to be true, and I'd rather be the one who says it out loud than find out he noticed first."
She went up around midnight and I told her I'd be right behind her.
I wasn't. I rinsed the two wine glasses and set them upside down on the towel. Then I stood at the sink with my hands on the edge of it, the way you do when you've stood up too fast.
Not oblivious. It took a twenty-nine-year-old with a bottle of wine to hand me that.
I'd been carrying around a version of my husband where he simply hadn't looked.
A man sits in a room two decades and doesn't see the thing in front of him.
That happens. That's a real thing, and I could have forgiven it inside a week, because I've been married to him long enough to know he can miss a haircut.
He hadn't missed it. Somebody said it to him out loud, in a driveway, on a summer night, and he stood there and picked.
And then, at half past midnight at my own sink with the porch light coming through the window over the door, I finally let a thought all the way to the end of itself for the first time in twenty-five years.
It wasn't does he love me. I've never needed to ask that one; the answer's yes and it's never been anything else.
It was how many other times.
Not affairs, nothing like that. Just — how many times has there been something inconvenient in that family, and a decision about who was going to eat it, and how many times did my husband look around the room and land on me? Because I was the cheap one. Because I'd understand.
I shut the lamp off and got into bed beside him, and he moved toward me in his sleep the way he's done for twenty-five years, and I lay there in the dark next to a man who has never once in his life meant to hurt me, doing arithmetic.