What Makes a Family

While everyone else’s head is bowed and Little Joe is saying grace, I peek at my family gathered around the table. Joe sits at the head of the table not looking like himself without his ball cap. Of course Mrs. Brodie’s chair is empty. But everyone else is here: my Abby, my Celeste, my Joseph, and my Sarah. I wish Reed, Abby’s boy, were here, too. He’s a good boy. I don’t understand him. He’s like a boy from outer space to me, but he’s sweet like his father, and he never looks at me like the rest of the Brodies do. He never expects anything from me, which means I never disappoint him. Reed’s needs have always been easy, ever since he was a baby. As long as he had a dry diaper and a full tummy, he was content. Joseph was mostly that way, too. And Little Joe is, too.

So maybe it’s girls that always expect too much.

My gaze drifts to Mrs. Brodie’s empty chair as Little Joe asks God the Father to look over us in our time of need and give us comfort in knowing that Mrs. Brodie will soon be with Him. Mrs. Brodie’s chair is almost glowing, and I blink, knowing it must be my imagination, or a lightbulb in the lamp overhead that needs changing. I’ve always been a God-fearing woman, heavy on the fearing part, but honestly, I’ve never felt much like He was with me. That Mrs. Brodie’s chair is lit up shouldn’t surprise me. I have no doubt God is with her. Always has been. It’s why she’s lived such a blessed life.

I keep staring at her chair from under my lashes. I came close to sitting in it when everyone walked into the kitchen and sat down for supper. I stood right there in the middle of the kitchen, bowl of mashed potatoes in my hand, and stared that chair down. Because it’s mine now. Or will be. It’s my rightful place, next to my husband. My whole life I’ve waited for Mrs. Brodie to leave it to me, and finally it’s happening. But now I’m scared. I don’t even know if I want the stupid chair. Especially with it glowing like that.

“Amen.”

I don’t realize grace is over for a second, not until I hear the clink of a serving spoon in a bowl. I drop my hands to my lap and look up, feeling guilty. I should have been praying and not gathering wool. No one seems to have noticed. They never do.

Everyone starts talking at once, which is the way my family does. I only get bits and pieces. Celeste says something to Sarah, and Abby’s putting her two cents in while talking to her daddy. Then Celeste is complaining about the skin on the chicken and saying she wants a piece of baked breast. “Isn’t there a baked breast?” she asks no one in particular.

My granddaughter says, “’Tis but a tub. Sit.” Just blurts it out. I know it’s one of those silly word things she likes, but I’m a little worried about the girl, and I have half a mind to talk to Abby about her. Fifteen-year-old girls don’t just say “’Tis but a tub. Sit.” I wonder if she needs to see a doctor.

“Dad, I ordered the part for the combine.” Joseph is putting two pieces of fried chicken on his plate. Thighs. He likes dark meat like me. My favorite is wings, though. Nobody else likes them, so I always get the wings. He looks across the table at me. “Chicken smells great, Mom. I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Think you’ve outdone yourself.”

I look down at my empty plate, feeling my cheeks get warm under the praise. “Biscuit?” I say, picking up the plate and holding it out for Little Joe.

He takes two.

“Overnight it?” Little Joe asks, dishing out a heaping spoonful of peas onto his plate.

“Yeah, but shipping’s free,” Joseph says.

“Have you got any real vegetables in the fridge, Birdie?” Celeste asks. “Something that’s not a carb?”

“Maybe a head of lettuce,” I answer. “Carrots.”

Celeste is fiddling with her hair. She’s going bald, just like her daddy. I don’t care how much she fluffs it; she can’t hide it. “Carrots are carbs, Birdie. Don’t you know how much sugar is in a carrot?”

I don’t say anything. I put a biscuit on my plate and pass the plate to Abby.

“Hey, Grandpop, Birdie tell you I’ve been looking through photo albums?” Sarah calls across the table.

I’m impressed by my granddaughter’s maturity, by how well she carries herself. Speaks. (When she’s not blurting out those weird sentences.) She seems like a girl who’s not afraid of anything or anyone. I give Abby and Drum credit for that. They’re good parents.

“That right?” my Joe says, passing me the mashed potatoes. He’s put a big pile on his plate. Doc Moses says he needs to lose weight, but Joe works hard. A hardworking man has a big appetite. Brodie men all have big appetites. And you can’t give them a green salad and call it supper.

I spoon some potatoes on my plate and pass them on, watching Sarah shake her head when Joseph tries to put a drumstick on her plate. She laughs and pushes at the piece of chicken on the end of his fork like it’s a dog turd or something.

“Ewww,” Sarah squeals. “Stop, Uncle Joseph! Haven’t you seen Forks Over Knives?”

“What’s that?” he asks her, still trying to make her take the chicken.

“A documentary on Netflix.” Abby. “I don’t know that I agree that we should all become vegans, but it will make you think. You should watch it sometime.”

“There more butter, Birdie?” Little Joe asks without looking at me.

I push my chair back, and it scrapes the floor loudly. Duke yipes like I’ve taken off his leg instead of just bumping it. “Dogs shouldn’t be at the table,” I say to no one.

“Grandpop. Do you know where Mom Brodie’s marriage certificate is? Birdie says she doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

“House fire, when she was a little girl,” Little Joe responds. “But there’s a marriage certificate. Imagine it’s in my office somewhere.”

“Birdie thought it might be at the bank.”

“Nope, she brought all her stuff home to go through it. After they told her she had cancer.”

Sarah rests her chin on her fist, her elbow on the table. “I was wondering what year she and Great-Grandpop got married.”

I open the refrigerator and pull out a stick of butter. I unwrap it as I carry it to the table. It looks strange to see Mrs. Brodie’s chair empty, and it sets me off-kilter. She never misses supper. I put the stick on the butter dish in front of Little Joe and mumble something about checking on Mrs. Brodie. I love having everyone here, but it makes me anxious, too. All the laughing and talking between them, and I can’t think of a thing to say to anyone.

I go down the hall. In the sewing room, I turn on the bedside light. I notice a couple of red and white peppermints beside the teacup and the baby monitor and the pill bottles. Abby must have left them there. She and Mrs. Brodie were always eating them together.

“Just checking on you,” I say. I smooth the light blanket beneath her chin. I stand there for a minute looking down on her. She’s still breathing. “Made fried chicken and dumplings for supper. Added a little paprika to the flour for the chicken, like you showed me. Hope I didn’t put too much in.”

I look at her as if I think she’s going to say something back, but she doesn’t of course. It’s funny. There were times when I would have given anything to make her stop talking. Always criticizing me. Always telling me what I should say. What I should do. What I shouldn’t have said or done. Now . . . I just wish she’d say something. Anything. Even if it’s just to tell me the chicken’s got too much paprika.

“Sarah found my book,” I hear myself whisper. I have no idea why I’m telling her. “You know, my Arizona book. My own fault. I must have left it in the living room and then forgot about it in all the hubbub of your getting sick. It’s called the Grand Canyon State. Arizona. You probably know that. But did you know it’s also called the Apache State? Like the Indians. Native Americans,” I correct myself.

I stand there, quiet for a minute. I can hear everyone talking in the kitchen. Laughing. The sound didn’t change when I left the room. “I don’t think she looked at it, though,” I go on. “It was just lying there on the floor. I don’t think she noticed it. I’ll be more careful, now on.” I watch Mrs. Brodie’s chest rise and fall. I find myself trying to match my breath to hers, but it’s so slow, it makes me dizzy.

“Well . . .” I say finally. “Guess I’ll go have my supper. You need anything, you just holler.”

Later, I lie in bed in the dark, listening to Little Joe unbuckle his pants over on his side of the bed. He sleeps in his underdrawers. Always shuts the light off before he undresses.

“You check on Mama before you came up?” he asks me, throwing his pants over the chair. Then he adds his shirt, and I smell his state of undress. Not that he stinks. Little Joe has always been clean, not like some farmers who barely take a sponge bath on Sunday mornings. Joe showers regularly. Uses deodorant. But he has a man smell about him that I find strangely comforting. Especially since I don’t worry anymore about him pulling off his underdrawers. That ended after I had my hysterectomy ten years back. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t doing my wifely duty anymore. That I wasn’t doing it. I guess we just came to a silent agreement. Husbands and wives our age don’t do that anymore, anyway.

I wonder sometimes if he misses it, though. And if he tried with me, how I’d respond. I think maybe I’d let him, just because he likes it. And it’s really not that awful, and it’s over quick enough. A small price to pay when the man keeps a roof over my head.

I make a sound of affirmation. “And turned out her light. Just left the night-light burning. Plugged it in over by the door. And the baby monitor’s on.” I nod to the white receiver on my nightstand. Its little light glows green. I hesitate. “You tell her good night?” I ask him.

He sighs and sits down on the edge of the bed, and I feel the mattress shift. “It’s hard to see her like that, Birdie. She . . . she looks like she’s already gone.”

“But she’s not, Joe.” My words seem to hang in the darkness. I want to tell him that he ought to be sitting down there right now, holding her hand. Helping her pass. I want to tell him how lucky he is to have had his mother all these years. But I know he wouldn’t understand. I guess you have to be an orphan to appreciate a mother or a father.

He peels back the sheet and gets into bed beside me, and I feel him settle his head on his pillow. We both lie there, staring at the ceiling.

“Sarah gone to bed?” he asks.

“Light was still on, but the door was shut.”

“She sure has gotten pretty, hasn’t she?” I hear the smile in his voice. “Reminds me of Abby at that age.”

“Prettier than Abby was,” I say, and close my eyes.

We’re quiet again, and I feel the familiar heat of his body beside mine. He and I have been sleeping in this bed side by side almost five decades. I wonder what it would be like to not have him here. His father died of a heart attack around the age Little Joe is now. It could happen.

I wonder if I could sleep without him. The only time we haven’t slept together is when one of us was in the hospital, me for my hysterectomy, him when he got an infection in his arm from a cut from a piece of machinery. And after Joseph was born, when I told Little Joe if he crossed the threshold of our bedroom while I was in it, I’d shoot him with his own shotgun. Back then, he kept it loaded, propped in the corner of the room. People used to do that in those days, keep loaded guns ready for robbers. Now we have a gun safe in his office.

“Abby say how late they’ll be?” Joe asks me.

“Knowing Celeste, last call.” They’d gone to The Gull for a drink, our three children. It made me feel good to see the three of them together, laughing and arguing in the kitchen over whose car they were taking into town. But it made me a little sad, too. They asked their daddy if he wanted to go. He knew better than to say yes. He saw the way I looked at him when they asked. But they didn’t ask me. Not that I’d go. I’ve never set foot in there but once, and that was when the devil got into me and I went in and told Little Joe to get on home because all three of his kids were down with a stomach virus and I’d cleaned up enough vomit and diarrhea for one day.

“How did Celeste seem to you?” Joe shifts his weight in the bed and starts cracking his knuckles. He always cracks his knuckles the last thing before he goes to sleep. “She seemed good to me. She seem good to you?”

“She’s puttin’ on a good face,” I answer. “Don’t know how good she’s doing. She doesn’t look like she’s getting enough to eat. She’s nothing but bones.”

“She said something at dinner about an audition next week. Some TV show or something. Sounds like she’s getting a lot of auditions. She’s bound to get a part sooner or later.”

I don’t know what kind of lies Celeste’s been feeding him. I missed that bit of the conversation at dinner. But I don’t say anything. If Joe wants to go on thinking his daughter is some big, fancy actress, who am I to burst his bubble? Instead, I say, “I imagine she’s worried about money. Rent keeps going up. That health insurance she gets on the Internet, it keeps going up and up, too. I think the money will ease her mind. What Mrs. Brodie leaves her.”

He makes a grunting sound and rolls over, his back to me. I roll in the other direction and reach out to set the alarm to get up and check on Mrs. Brodie in two hours. The digits glow red. It’s nine thirty-two.