PART 2: She Handed Me the Phone
“Put her in the picture.”
Ray said it to Amber, not to me. He hadn’t raised his voice in twenty years. He didn’t raise it now.
Amber still had her hand out for the phone. My thumb was still on the button.
“Ray. It’s just family.”
“She’s holding the phone.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Somebody’s had to since before you were born.”
Mr. Pace set his pen down and left his hand flat on the will, the way a man does when he’s seen this before and knows better than to say anything.
Ellie slid off the windowsill and came and stood against my leg. She’s seven. She turned my cuff over in her fingers.
“Gramma, why’s your button a different blue?”
“Because it came off a wedding coat,” I said.
Amber breathed out through her nose. “It looks shabby, Ellie. That’s all.” Then, to me, “Brenda, honestly.”
“Amber.” Ray said her name once and she stopped.
“She drove my mother to dialysis twice a week for six years,” he said. He said it to the room. “Forty minutes each way. Tuesdays and Fridays. I was two states away. I sent cards.”
“That’s not the point—”
“I’m not finished.”
He turned and looked at me. Straight on. I don’t think he’d done that since before the divorce.
“Mr. Pace. Would you mind taking it? Everybody in. Brenda in the middle.”
Mr. Pace looked at me. Not at Ray. At me. He was asking.
I stood there with Amber’s phone in my hand. It was warm from her pocket. The lock screen was a picture of Ellie at the beach.
Thirty years I’d been moving half a step to the right so the picture would look right.
At Matt’s graduation, when the photographer called for immediate family, I held the coats.
The morning Ellie was born, I sat in the waiting room and passed out the sandwiches.
Every Thanksgiving, I set the whole table and ate at the far end by the hallway, where the chair was.
I’m not telling you I was a saint. I’m telling you I was tired.
“No,” I said.
Amber blinked. “No?”
“I’m not going to stand in a picture that has to be argued for.”
“Brenda. Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I’m being finished.”
Ray’s jaw moved. He didn’t say anything. Twenty years of practice.
Amber crossed her arms. “Fine. I’m sorry if this made you feel left out. Okay? There. Is that better?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not an apology. That’s a receipt, and I’m not signing it.”
Mr. Pace slid Vera’s tin across the desk to me. Small, dented, painted with a rose that had mostly worn off.
I put it in my bag.
“Ray,” I said. “I know the stairs.”
“I know you do.”
“Then don’t.”
He sat back down.
I went down past the brass planter and out onto Vine Street and stood on the sidewalk a minute, because my hands were shaking and I didn’t want to drive like that. Upstairs I could hear chairs. Not words. Just chairs.
*
Matt sent me the photo that night.
The four of them by the window. Amber in the middle, where Ray had wanted me.
I looked at it once and set the phone face down on the counter and went to bed.
*
Wednesday I picked Ellie up at three, like I always do.
Amber met me at the door with a dish towel over her shoulder and her arms folded.
“I want to say something,” she said.
“Say it.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just — you have to understand, Ray’s her son, and Matt’s her grandson, and it was a photo for the wall.”
“Amber.”
“What.”
“That’s the same sentence you said upstairs.”
She looked down at the dish towel like it had done something to her.
“Ellie’s got her shoes on,” she said.
Ellie came out with one shoe on and one in her hand and asked if Vera’s tin had any gold buttons in it. I said I didn’t know yet. She said she’d help me look.
We went to the park. She ate a whole sleeve of crackers and fell asleep in the car. She never once asked why her mother and I had been standing in that doorway.
*
Matt came by on Saturday.
He sat at my kitchen table with both hands around a mug the way his father does, and for a while neither of us said anything.
“You didn’t say anything,” I told him.
“I know.”
“In the office. You looked at the floor.”
“I know.”
“I’m not asking you to fight for me, Matt. I’m telling you how it felt. Like I was the coats again.”
He sat with that one.
“I don’t know how to say it to her,” he said.
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to say it.”
He drank his coffee and didn’t answer. But he didn’t leave either, and he did the dishes before he went, which he hasn’t done since he was nineteen.
*
The next Saturday, Amber came alone and stayed on the porch. She didn’t come in.
“Can I try again?” she said.
I stood in the doorway with my arms crossed.
“Go on.”
“That day, I handed you the phone because I didn’t want to have to think about where you’d stand.” She said it slowly, the way you say a thing you practiced in the car. “You’re not hard to place, Brenda. I just never wanted to do the placing. That’s on me. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about the cardigan at Thanksgiving. That was mean, and I knew it was mean when I said it.”
“That’s better,” I said.
“So are we okay?”
“We’re not anything yet,” I said. “We can see what you do next.”
She nodded like that was fair, because it was.
“July,” she said. “The lake. We were hoping you’d take Ellie the whole two weeks.”
I thought about it while the wind moved the porch light.
“Three days,” I said. “And you’ll all be here Sunday for dinner. Bring a dish.”
“We never—”
“Now you do.”
She went down the steps, and I watched her drive off.
*
They came Sunday.
Matt brought a casserole he’d clearly bought at the store. Amber brought a pie and set it on the counter without being asked. Ellie sat on my lap and ate the middle out of a roll and put the rest on my plate.
Nobody talked about the office. Everybody ate.
When they left, Amber stopped at the door and looked at the cardigan hanging on the chair by the window. She didn’t say anything about it. She just looked, and then she went out.
I did the dishes and dried them and put them away.
Then I got the tin down off the sill and opened it at the table.
Wooden buttons. One pearl. A hook and eye. A little brass buckle from somewhere. And down under a fold of wax paper, the match to my blue.
Same glass. Same chips on the edge. Two of them off the same coat, and one of them in my cuff since I was forty.
I threaded a needle and sewed it onto the other sleeve, six passes through every hole, the way Vera taught me.
Then I hung the cardigan over the chair by the window and left the lamp on, the way she used to.
The two buttons caught the light, one on each cuff.
It looked fine.