Chapter 13
TOM
She got me alone at four o'clock in the kitchen, which is where my grandmother has conducted every piece of family business since Eisenhower.
I was rinsing pans. Cheryl was out in the front room with Pauline and the photo albums, Rachel had come by for pie on her way to her boyfriend's, and the house had dropped into that low hum it gets late in the afternoon of a holiday.
I'd been waiting on it since about two-fifteen.
There's a thing you learn about a bad connection, which is that it's going to arc eventually, so you may as well be standing there with a meter when it does.
Grandma came in and shut the door to the dining room, which she does for two reasons: money, or somebody's marriage.
"You embarrassed me," she said.
I kept my hands in the water. "I don't think anybody was embarrassed."
"In my own house. On Christmas. In front of your father."
"I sat down and ate a meal."
"You know exactly what you did."
I did. I shut the water off and dried my hands on the rooster towel and turned around to face her, because she deserved to be looked at while she said it.
"You made a display. You picked up your plate in front of twenty-two people so everybody would see you do it. That's not a man taking a seat. That's a man making a point."
I had the whole file ready to hand her. Cheryl's been hurt for years.
Rachel asked me about it when she was sixteen.
There's a photograph from your eightieth where my wife is standing in a doorway holding a bowl.
Every word of it would have handed my grandmother Cheryl's name to hold onto.
She'd have taken it, too, and by New Year's the story in this family would have been that Cheryl got upset about a chair.
"Cheryl didn't ask me to do anything," I said.
Her chin came up. "Don't cover for her."
"I'm not covering. It's a fact." I put the towel down. "She told me not to talk to you. Three separate times. I offered, she said no, and the last time she was pretty short with me about it."
"Then why."
"Because I didn't want to sit there."
She looked at me a long moment. Out in the dining room somebody laughed at something.
"She's never once complained," Grandma said. "Not in twenty-five years. Not to me, not to your mother when she was alive, not to anybody. If it was such a terrible thing she'd have said something."
That was my argument. Word for word. That's what I said to Cheryl in the truck with my hands at ten and two.
You never said anything. You laughed. You made the joke yourself.
I'd stood on that for twenty-five years like it was a floor.
Coming out of my grandmother's mouth it sounded like a recording of me.
"She didn't complain," I said. "That's true."
"Well."
"That was never proof she was happy."
Grandma took a dish towel off the oven handle, folded it in half, folded it again, and hung it back exactly where it had been.
"You've got ham on your cuff," she said.
I looked. There was ham on my cuff.
"I'll get it out."
"Cold water. Not hot. Hot sets it."
Then her mouth tightened and she smoothed the front of her cardigan with one hand, which is what she does instead of arguing.
"You've been listening to somebody."
"I've been looking at photographs."
I watched her decide whether to ask about that, and watched her decide not to. There are things that woman will not walk toward.
"It's Christmas," she said instead. "I'm ninety-seven years old. I don't know how many more of these I've got."
"I know it."
"Then why would you do this now."
"Because I ran out of reasons not to."
She stood there. Then she picked up a stack of dessert plates she had no need to pick up and carried them four feet to the counter, which is what she does instead of finishing a conversation.
"Your mother would have hated this," she said, with her back to me.
"My mother sat where you told her to for thirty-one years, Grandma."
She didn't answer, and I let that be the last of it.
I stayed in that kitchen a minute after she went out.
There's a picture on the side of her refrigerator, under a magnet from a tire place, of my grandfather at the walnut table around 1988 — head of the table, paper napkin tucked into his collar, which drove her crazy, laughing at something out of frame.
I've looked at that picture ten thousand times.
I looked at it again and thought about a linoleum floor on Federal Street in 1950, and a twenty-two-year-old with a baby on her hip eating off the everyday plates while he sat at his mother's table with a napkin in his collar.
He never moved either.
I went back out to the dining room, and of course they were talking about it. Denise and Kayla and Marlene were down at the end of the walnut table with coffee, Mitch was leaning in the archway, and it had already turned into logistics with the speed only a family can manage.
"—because if you put the two leaves in plus the card table you could do a U," Kayla was saying.
"There's no room for a U, the china cabinet's there."
"So move the china cabinet."
"You move the china cabinet, it's got Grandma's Depression glass in it."
"All I'm saying is if we're doing this now, then Easter we should just?—"
"Tom." Marlene turned around with her coffee. "Tom, come here, settle this. Does Cheryl want to be at the big table from now on or not? Because if she does, somebody's got to talk to your grandmother, and I'm not doing it."
Four people looked at me.
And I felt the pull to answer. God, I felt it.
Two seconds and it would have been done, and it would have felt so good and so helpful.
Yeah, she does. That's what this whole thing was about.
I'd have been the guy who fixed it, standing in the middle of my family delivering my wife's position like a foreman reading off a change order.
Twelve feet away, in the front room, Cheryl was sitting on the arm of the sofa next to Pauline with a photo album open across both their laps.
"Ask Cheryl," I said.
Marlene blinked. "What?"
"She's right there. Ask her."
"I'm asking you."
"I know you are. Ask her."
Denise laughed, one short surprised syllable, and looked into her coffee. Mitch said, "Fair enough," and went to find the ballgame. Marlene made a face at me like I'd been unhelpful, which I had been, on purpose, for the first time in my life.
Cheryl's fine with it. Cheryl doesn't mind. She'd rather be in there with the kids anyway. I've said every one of those out loud, in that house, to relatives, about a woman standing thirty feet away who can talk. So they could go ask her. If it got awkward, it could be awkward.
My father found me at the coffee pot ten minutes later. He worked forty-one years at the same shop, and in twenty-five years he has said maybe nine sentences to me about my marriage.
"Your grandmother's steamed."
"I figured."
He poured, and put in three sugars, which his cardiologist has opinions about.
"Your mother sat in there," he said. "Thirty-one years. Every holiday."
"I know she did."
"She never said a word to me about it."
He was watching the coffee, not me.
"Did you ever ask her?"
He didn't answer for a while. He put the spoon in the sink, which he never does; he always leaves it on the counter.
"She hated that lace tablecloth," he said. "Used to say it was a dust rag with pretensions." He almost smiled. "I forgot she ever said that until about ten minutes ago."
"Dad."
He stopped in the doorway with the cup.
"Did she ever say anything to you about it? Ever."
He looked at the carpet a second.
"She asked me one time if I thought your grandmother liked her. Nineteen eighty-something. In the car."
"What'd you say?"
"I said of course she does."
He went on out to the front room, which is the absolute outer limit of what my father can do, and it was more than I expected out of him.
I got a coffee I didn't want and stood in the archway. Cheryl was showing Pauline something in the album — Pauline saying, "Now who is that, is that Dorothy's boy," and Cheryl saying, "That's you, Pauline. That's you at the fair."
She glanced up. The front room is ten feet from the end of that table and my aunt Marlene has never lowered her voice in her life, so she'd heard it.
She looked at me over the top of the album with an expression I hadn't seen on her since about the twenty-sixth of November.
She didn't smile. She held my eye a second and went back to Pauline.
"That's you at the fair," she said again. "Nineteen fifty-one. You've got a hat on."
"I never wore a hat," Pauline said.
I drank about half of the coffee I didn't want.