Chapter 10
CHERYL
On the twenty-third he did the shopping by himself.
I found the list later in the pocket of his work coat, folded in quarters and gone soft at the creases from being handled — his block capitals, with things added at the bottom in a different pen, one of them just the word ICE with two underlines.
He was gone two hours and forty minutes and came back with eleven bags: four pounds of butter, a yellow box of gluten-free brownie mix, a sleeve of eighty takeout containers.
Also a nine-dollar poinsettia, which nobody in that family has ever brought to anything, and which sat on our counter until January because he forgot it in the truck on Christmas morning.
Then on the twenty-fourth he went out again at nine in the morning and came home with a folding chair. Not a card table chair — a real one, the padded kind with the curved back, from the hardware store on Freeport Road.
"That's for Pauline," he said, before I could ask. "The cane one hurts her tailbone and the cushion only does so much. I measured the seat height off the walnut table chairs. It's an inch and a half taller."
"You measured."
"I measured Sunday, when we dropped off the ham money."
The price tag was still on it where it leaned against the hallway wall. Thirty-eight dollars.
"You know she's going to say it's too fancy."
"She's going to sit in it, though."
She did sit in it. She sat in it at Christmas, at Easter, and in June under the canopy, and she has never once thanked him for it, because she's ninety-one and to her a chair is a chair.
"Thirty-eight dollars," I said.
"It's a good chair."
"I know it's a good chair. I'm saying you bought a chair."
"They had one left." He was already carrying it down the hall. "It's not going to be a thing, Cheryl. It's a chair for a woman with a bad hip."
He set it in the corner by the coats and there it sat until Christmas morning.
Christmas Eve he made the sweet potatoes, and I stayed out of that kitchen for an hour and fifteen minutes, which was among the harder physical acts of my adult life.
I sat in the front room with a book I didn't read.
I heard the mixer. I heard a pan go in the oven and the door come open again forty seconds later, which meant he'd forgotten the foil, and then I heard him say a word I won't repeat.
At twenty of nine he came out.
"Marshmallows," he said.
"What about them."
"I bought the mini ones."
"Okay."
"The card says marshmallows. It doesn't say what kind." He had a dish towel over his shoulder, which is a thing I've never once seen him do. "The minis melt down into like a — it's a crust. It's a crust, Cher. It's not a top."
"Some people like the crust."
"Do you? Like the crust."
"No."
"Right," he said, and took the towel off his shoulder, and got his keys.
The Giant Eagle closes at nine on Christmas Eve. He made it with six minutes to spare and was back at nine-twenty with a bag of the big ones. Then the oven door, then the drawer where the spatulas are, then a stretch of nothing.
"Cher."
"Mm."
"When you do these. You put them on cold or hot?"
"Hot. They set better."
"Both pans?"
"Both pans."
He scraped the crust off into the sink, which took him twenty minutes and made a mess I did not clean up. At ten-fifteen he came out with sugar dried on his forearm and said the second one looked all right. It did look all right. Neither of us said anything about the first one.
What he did not do, at any point, was turn around and start the sentence I'd been braced for all week — the one that begins hey, can you just. Said in a kitchen at half past nine at night, that sentence would have moved the whole thing back onto my side of the room without either of us noticing it happen.
He went and got the right marshmallows instead.
A man drove to a grocery store. That's the entire event.
But for twenty-five years I've been the one who gets called at nine-fifteen at night, because calling me is cheaper than solving it, and that night I sat in the next room and listened to somebody solve a problem without spending me.
I put the book down and listened to the spatula a while.
He'd come back from the store on the twenty-third with one other thing, which he set on the counter without comment: a two-pound bag of ice.
"Grandma's got one tray," he said.
"She's got two. One of them's cracked."
"That's worse than one tray."
"It is worse than one tray."
He put it out in the deep freeze in the garage, then came back and stood with his hands on his hips looking at a counter covered in bags, like a man surveying a job that's gone longer than the estimate.
"Can I ask you something without it turning into a whole thing?"
"You can try."
"How many years have you been doing this in one day?"
"All of them."
"All of them." He rubbed his eyes. "And then you get in the car at eight in the morning, drive out there, and sit at a card table."
"Yes."
"And you never?—"
"Tom." I picked up the brownie box and turned it over to read directions I didn't need, because I wanted something in my hands. "Be careful with that question. There's a version of it that's about you feeling bad, and I don't have room for that this week."
He took it on the chin, nodded, started putting bags away, and didn't ask again.
Rachel drove back in on Christmas Eve day and stayed through.
She brought her laundry, which at twenty-nine is either charming or not depending on the year, and spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend's mother about Boxing Day, which involves three families and a drive to Wheeling.
Afterward she came out of the bedroom and lay face down on the couch.
"Everybody's people are insane," she said into a cushion.
"Mm."
"His mother wants to do gifts at eleven and dinner at one and then she wants us to drive to his aunt's."
"On the same day?"
"On the same day."
"What'd you say?"
"I said that sounded great." She rolled over. "Why did I say that?"
"Because you're twenty-nine and you don't want to be the one who ruined Boxing Day."
"That's a horrible answer."
"It's your first year in it. You get about four more of those, and then you have to start telling the truth, or you'll be doing the Wheeling drive when you're fifty."
She stared at the ceiling a second. "That's also a horrible answer," she said, and went to move her laundry.
The two of us did the wrapping at the kitchen table after Tom went up.
"He's really doing it," she said, tearing tape with her teeth.
"Don't do that, you'll crack a molar. I've seen it."
"You've seen it once."
"I've seen it four times."
She used the dispenser. "He called me Tuesday and asked what Brayden's brownies were called."
"What'd you tell him?"
"That I didn't know, and that he should ask you, and he said no." She set the scissors down. "He said he wasn't going to make you do one more thing for that house this year."
I folded the corner of a box very carefully.
"Mom." Rachel put her chin in her hand. "Do you think he actually gets it? Or is he doing chores really loudly?"
Which was, I thought, a superb question out of a twenty-nine-year-old. I thought about the albums fanned across the den floor, and his face in that doorway, and the four seconds in my kitchen when I asked what he'd do if Alma said no.
"I think he finally knows there's a question."
"That's not really an answer."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
"Can I tell you the thing I keep getting stuck on?" She was taping a corner. "It's not even the table."
"What is it?"
"It's that he thought it was fine because you two are good." She frowned at the box. "Like, they're solid, so the rest doesn't count. And I get it, because that's what I thought too, but it's such a?—"
"It's the whole thing," I said.
"Yeah."
"I've been chewing on that for a month." I ran the ribbon over the scissor edge to curl it. "He's a good husband in this house. He has been the entire time. That's not a story I'm telling myself, honey, that's just true. The trouble is that in this house is the only place he ever had to be one."
Rachel stopped taping.
"Nobody watches you in your own kitchen. Nobody's grandmother is standing there. It's easy to be loyal where it's free."
"That's bleak, Mom."
"It's not bleak. It's where the bill comes due." I put the ribbon down. "Anybody can love you in private. The whole question is what he does in a room with twenty-two people in it."
He came down for water around ten-thirty, after Rachel had gone up. I was at the sink filling the coffee pot for the morning, and he stood in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants with his hair flat on one side.
"Cher."
"Mm."
"Tomorrow." He came in and leaned against the counter beside me without touching me. "Where do you want to sit?"
The tap was still running. I shut it off.
It would have been so easy. He was standing right there, wide open, ready to do whatever I said. I could have said beside you and he'd have done it. I could have said at the big table and he'd have gone to war with a ninety-seven-year-old woman on Christmas morning to make it happen.
And then for the rest of my life, every time I thought about it, I'd have known I asked.
"I don't know," I said.
He waited. "That's not — I'm not trying to trap you here. I'm asking."
"I know you are, and I'm telling you the truth. I don't know."
"Cheryl."
I turned around and looked at him. He looked exhausted, and about ten years older than he'd looked in November, and he smelled faintly of burnt sugar.
"If I tell you where to sit, then tomorrow you do a thing I told you to do. And you'll do it perfectly, because you're a good husband and you always have been. And I'll watch you do it, and I still won't know."
"Know what?"
"What you'd have done."
He was quiet a second. "That's the whole test," he said. Not a question.
"It's not a test. I'm not grading you." I dried my hands.
"But your grandmother is going to do exactly what she's done every year of your life, and there's going to be a moment tomorrow, and it's going to last about two seconds, and it's going to feel like nothing at all.
That's the part nobody warns you about. It never feels like a big moment.
It feels like a normal Tuesday where somebody tells you where to sit. "
He nodded slowly. "Two o'clock. Ham comes out at two."
"That's right."
He went up. I stood in my own kitchen holding a coffee pot on Christmas Eve, twenty-five years in, with no idea at all what was going to happen the next day.
Rachel came down about ten minutes later for the ibuprofen. She got the bottle out of the cabinet and then leaned against the counter with it in her hand instead of going back up.
"You heard that," I said.
"The house is eleven hundred square feet, Mom."
"Mm."
"He asked you a direct question."
"He did."
"And you said you didn't know."
I put the lid on the coffee maker. The clock ticked, three minutes fast.
"I know exactly where I want him," I said.
Rachel didn't say anything.
"I've known since Thanksgiving. I could have told him in four words in the truck on the county road before we ever got as far as the Sheetz." I wiped a counter that didn't need it. "I want him next to me. That's the whole ask."
"So why?—"
"Because then I'd have asked."
She waited me out. She's good at that, which she did not get from her father.
"If I say it out loud and he does it, I'll never know whether he'd have come to it himself." I heard how that sounded. "That's the version I've been telling myself, and it's true enough. But it isn't all of it."
"What's all of it?"
I stood there with the dishrag in my hand.
"I'm fifty-three years old, and I have never once in my life said to that man, out loud, I need you to pick me.
Not when my mother died. Not when I was pregnant with you and terrified out of my mind.
I've asked him for a ride to the airport.
I've asked him to get the gutters. I've never asked him for that.
" The rag wasn't doing anything. I put it down.
"And I would rather set up an entire Christmas where he has to work it out on his own than stand in this kitchen and say a sentence like that and watch his face while he decides. "
Rachel set the ibuprofen down on the counter.
"Mom, that's kind of a big thing to just?—"
"I know what it is."
"Are you going to tell him?"
"Not tomorrow." I shut the light off over the stove, so we were standing in the glow coming off the tree in the front room, which made it easier.
"Tomorrow he can do what he does. But I want you to know I'm not back here being noble about it, because your father's going to think I am, and he'll be wrong. "
She hugged me one-armed and sideways, the way she does when she doesn't want it to be a whole thing.
"You're allowed to want to be picked," she said.
"I'm aware of what I'm allowed."
"That's not the same as thinking you'll get it."
She went up. I stayed down there a while in the dark with the tree lights coming through the doorway, and it had been a long time since there was something about my own life I didn't know.
I wasn't afraid, which surprised me. I was just ready to find out.