11

What I Think You Have Already Figured Out

I hear a car in the driveway. Mother is here. She is here! She is here! My little heart is beating fast. I have missed her so much.

While I cannot wait to see her, I am also incredibly angry at her. She has put us through so much stress and anxiety. Why did she leave so suddenly? Why didn’t she tell Father she was planning to go? It seems unnecessarily cruel to have left without warning. But maybe she knew my family would never let her go if they realized her intention to stay away for so long.

Father and my siblings spent a while getting ready for her visit. Father has many button-down flannel shirts, and this is what he would normally wear. But he does not wear one of these. Instead, he has on a new black sweater.

I wonder where the sweater came from. Did Sean or Jimmy or Mary help him pick it out? As he’s standing by the bed, I rub my head against his arm, and he strokes my back. The sweater is very soft and fits him perfectly. He looks comfortable, and I think he made a good choice.

We have to make an effort to get Mother to stay. I hope she’s coming home to stay. She has had plenty of time to take a break and rest herself. I need her to come back to take care of me—to take care of all of us. We have been struggling without her. I haven’t forgotten the days when the house was clean, we were all fed on time, and Mother and I were the best of friends. I can’t wait to take a long afternoon nap with her, the way we used to. Mother can climb under the wool blanket, and I will lie on top of it. I look forward to flopping down against her stomach and nuzzling my wet nose into her hand.

When she walks in the house, Mother is beaming, and she stares at everything around her. No wonder—she has not been here in months. Her eyes sparkle, and I can see she is so much better. So much healthier. Just like the old Mother I used to know. And I am so, so happy for her.

Everyone hugs Mother and smiles, and Jimmy hands Finn over to her. It is almost Christmas, and my family has decorated the best they could, and lights are twinkling on the tree. For a moment everything seems perfect.

I can’t believe what I am seeing! My sweet Mother. I forgot how beautiful and bright her face is. How everyone who sees her gets excited just looking at her. How her shiny black hair turns almost blue in the light. How she stands a good half-foot shorter than Father, and he towers over her. I am astonished at the little details I have already forgotten.

Yet I hang back, on a middle stair. Mother sees me and gasps with happiness, coming to the bottom of the stairs to coo at me. I just stare. I realize that I don’t want to approach her right now. She abandoned me. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair. I am disappointed at how quickly I have lost all of my resolve to make her want to stay. Instead, I want to punish her. When she takes a step toward me, I get to my feet to make it clear that I will run away if she pursues me. I know she will have strange scents on her, and I can’t deal with that yet.

Mother pouts, but that’s the way it is.

And then I notice for the first time that she has no suitcase with her. Mother is wearing new clothes and has not brought back her old clothes.

On top of that—and I am so surprised about this, but—there is a man with her. It is Robert, and I know him. He is a good friend of Mother’s, an old friend. He works with plants. Through the window I have seen his truck driving by, pulling a trailer with equipment on it. Not many homes on this street have grass because it is rocky and the woods are dense. But people need bushes trimmed back, and flowers planted, and that is what he does in this neighborhood. Father shakes Robert’s hand as if he was expecting him and does not look upset.

But I wasn’t expecting it, and I find it strange. I feel the fur on my back start to stand on end. Something is not right.

Robert stands next to Mother like he belongs here. Robert has kind brown eyes. Sometimes he wears glasses, sometimes not. He is a little like Father in that he is usually soft spoken and he is a good listener. And Mother has always looked at him fondly.

He is different from Father in that he has short dark hair and his skin is always tan from working outside. He is more wiry than Father, yet looks strong enough.

Father does our yard work himself. But Robert has stopped by many times over the years. Mother usually gave him water, and sometimes he did a small job that she requested, and he refused to take money for it. He came by a few times to visit the baby, and Mother always appreciated his gifts and his advice.

I always thought he was a sweet person.

But now, when he squeezes Mother’s hand as he says good-bye to her, my stomach drops.

Because suddenly I understand something I didn’t before.

Jimmy and Mary go out with Robert, leaving Finn with Mother and Father. They promise to be back later, when they will all open gifts.

Father and Mother go to the couch to talk, which they do for a long while. I sneak down and watch from under the rocking chair. Finn has fallen asleep in his car seat, so they leave him there on the floor by their feet. Mother can’t stop admiring the baby.

“Look at you,” Mother gushes, turning to Father. She rubs Father’s arm vigorously until he finally smiles at her. She remarks on the fact that he shaved, and touches his face gently. She says it reminds her of when they first met. She asks if he remembers when they first started dating.

I wonder now if Father knew that shaving would have this effect on her, if he guessed that it would remind her of those first years they were together. He looks at her as if he can’t possibly get enough of her. But then I can tell from the sudden sadness in his face that he realizes that he doesn’t actually want to hear those stories.

We have all heard the story of how they met a million times.

We’ve all heard the story of how she never knew Tommy in high school, even though it is a very small town. Mother moved here right before senior year thanks to her father’s new job, and Tommy had already graduated a year or two before.

But then they worked together that summer in the kitchen at the beach club. She’d had her eye on him for weeks, but Tommy never asked her out. He smiled at her, and he seemed to think she was very funny. He laughed at her stories, but he never made a move. All summer long.

Mother knew that Tommy met Sean and some other guys after work most nights, and they’d walk down to the rocks on the beach to drink beer and whatever they’d stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets. Mother dropped hints that she’d like to go, but they never invited her.

At this point in the story, if my siblings are listening, Mother pauses to remind them: Your father was never good with new people.

And she adds: Nobody in this town is good with new people.

So one night she was in the doorway to the kitchen at the beach club and she noticed some of the boys helping the chef with food prep. They were goofing around, singing and dancing to an old Rolling Stones song on the radio. Mother saw Tommy, and she was transfixed, watching him move, nodding his head, and that was it for her.

You wouldn’t know it, but Father is in fact a good dancer. He has more rhythm than the others do, although Mary is right behind him with some very graceful moves.

The way Mother tells it, by mid-August things were slow at the beach club. There weren’t many members around and they had a string of overcast days. So she invited Tommy to go for a walk around the club, and he said okay. They walked around the perimeter of the pool, and she ended up pulling him into the girls locker room, right into the first stall, shutting the door behind her.

Mother always was a little impulsive.

This is the way she tells the story to my siblings: She told Father she had her bathing suit on under her waitress uniform, so he suggested they go for a swim. And that’s what they did, sneaking out to jump in the ocean.

This is the way she tells the story to Sean: She told Father she had her bathing suit on under her waitress uniform, and he put his hands on his hips and told her to prove it. And he was such a cocky asshole that she whipped her dress off immediately, which completely astonished him.

Here, Mother pauses to show how his mouth hung partway open, his eyebrow arched.

When she kissed him, he tasted like Orange Crush soda. And she really expected someone as cute as Tommy Sullivan to know how to work a bikini, but he was useless with it. The strings behind her neck somehow ended up in tight knots that he couldn’t get undone without her help.

And then she laughs, and says to Sean, He was so cute but not so bright, you know?

I know Father whispered I love you before they ever left that stall, while she was sitting on his lap, which is where he always puts her when he is listening very closely to her.

And I know that she ignored what he said because she thought he was perfectly ridiculous and hilarious.

It wasn’t until months later that she fully realized how wrong she was. Father might have been acting ridiculous but he was never hilarious.

He is in fact dead serious about most everything and can’t tell a joke to save his life.

I’ve heard that story many times.

I once heard Father recall the end to that story when he was talking privately with Mother, which is that they ended up back down in the changing room stall, and Mother back on his lap, every day until the end of the summer. At which point the manager said, Thank God the season is over, or I’d have to fire you two, the way things are going.

But now, Father isn’t in the mood to hear this story.

He steers her off the topic and talks about the kids instead.

Father tells her that they all need her to come home, and she shakes her head. Finn stirs, so Mother takes him out of the car seat. She smiles at the baby while she keeps rubbing Father’s arm, but she still insists it won’t work. She reminds him that she “wasn’t happy.”

Wasn’t happy?

Weren’t we very, very happy? My ears pin back in frustration.

Frankly, I don’t care anymore that she “wasn’t happy.” We need her home. Don’t we?

“But your medication is working now,” Father argues, as if this was the only problem.

Mother has sharp words for him, reminding him of many, many things. She explains that when she says she wasn’t happy, she is not just talking about being depressed. I see the hope drain from Father’s face, leaving it very pale. When he keeps asking her questions and he is on the verge of tears, Mother just gets embarrassed for him and moves farther away from him on the couch.

She cuddles Finn and asks if he wants her to take the baby for a while, to make it easier on him.

“Whatever you want,” he insists.

In the end they agree that Finn belongs here, in this big house, with his siblings and Mahmee and the pets. Mother knows it has been hard on Father, and she apologizes over and over.

“It’s better for Finn to be here,” she says finally. “Safer. More secure. More people watching him.”

He can’t argue with that. And I know Father wants this baby. Back before she got pregnant, he asked her for this baby so many times I lost count. I remember it well.

I wonder if the reason Father wanted the baby is that he noticed Mother loves to talk about Jimmy and Mary when they were very young. She enjoys telling stories about her babies, who are now almost adults. I think Father may have hoped that a baby would make Mother cheerful again.

Most of the time Father asked Mother about having another baby in the bedroom, speaking softly to her, where no one else could hear other than me. But Mary once heard Father suggest it, and she made a funny face. As if he was talking nonsense. Jimmy and Mary probably never expected Mother to really get pregnant. Neither did I.

I wonder how Father achieved it. He does not seem capable of tricking Mother into doing what she does not want to do. I think it is possible that he was simply very persuasive when he was whispering and stroking her hair and unbuttoning her pajamas, and Mother let her guard down just long enough to agree to it.

Mother hands Finn to Father. Father rests the baby on his shoulder and pats the baby’s head. When he lifts his eyes to gaze at Mother again, she has turned away.

She leans down and wiggles her fingers, trying to coax me to come over to her. Her cooing is sweet in my ears. But I won’t do it.

Three things are so obvious that it hurts.

First: Father and I love Mother so much.

Second: Until this moment, he and I believed there was a chance she was going to announce today that she was coming home for good.

And the third I think you have already figured out.