PART 2: What Denise Told the Whole Yard
Denise stood with her hands at her sides. The spatula was still on the grill ledge behind her, dripping onto the concrete.
“I owe some people an apology,” she said. “And I’d rather do it out loud than keep doing it quiet.”
Nobody moved. Behind me, someone closed a cooler lid.
“Two years ago I stopped letting Ruby see Mia. That was me. All of it was me.”
Tommy shifted his weight. Deb put her hand flat on the table.
“I told people Ruby got busy with her own family. I told people she quit calling.” Denise looked down at her shoes. “She called every week for a year. I let it ring.”
My mouth went dry. I was still standing in the grass with the pan of fudge in both hands.
“Why?” Deb said.
“Because I’ve been mad at her since I was twelve years old.”
“At me?” I said.
“Not at you.” Denise finally looked up. “At how much of you everybody else got.”
She took a breath.
“I was six when you came. You braided my hair. You sat at that table with me and did fractions until nine at night. I remember every bit of that.”
“Then I remember the other part. Tommy’s truck broke down and you were gone. Deb got sick and you were gone three days. Corinne’s kids got the whole summer.”
“I kept a list,” she said. “When I was a kid I kept a list of every time you picked somebody else.”
A bee bumped against the sheet cake. Nobody shooed it away.
“I was a child,” she said. “Children keep lists.”
“You were mine too,” I said.
“I know.” Her voice cracked. “That’s what makes it worse.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“Then in April, Tommy told me something I never knew. He didn’t know I didn’t know it.”
Tommy looked up. “Denise.”
“Tell them.”
“You don’t have to do this here.”
“Tell them.”
So Tommy told them.
About the county hospital. I was twenty-one. Night shift. Better money than the laundry ever paid, and they’d have paid for me to finish school, and then for the LPN course after that. A woman from personnel called the house twice that spring.
“I said no,” I said. “Tommy was fifteen. Corinne was ten.”
“That’s not a secret,” Deb said. “That’s just what she did.”
“It’s a secret if nobody ever says it out loud,” Denise said.
She turned back to me.
“I took the one person who gave up everything and I made her the one person who got nothing. And then I taught my daughter to do the same thing.” She stopped. “I told Mia you didn’t want to come around. I told her you said the drive was too far and the house was too small. I made that up. She believed me because I’m her mother.”
The pan was getting heavy.
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Denise said. “I’m really sorry. I’m sorry if you felt pushed out of things.”
I set the pan down on the folding table.
“No,” I said.
She blinked. “No?”
“That’s not an apology. That’s a weather report.” I folded my arms because my hands had started shaking. “You didn’t push me out. You shut the door and you held it shut. There’s a difference, and you know the difference.”
Somebody at the far table got up and walked toward the house. Then stopped and sat back down.
Denise nodded slowly, the way people do when they’re being told something they already know.
Then she said it right.
“I lied about you for two years,” she said. “I lied to my daughter. I let you mail cards that I threw in the trash. I let you think you’d done something wrong. You never did anything wrong. It was me, and it was mean, and I did it on purpose.”
“Okay,” I said. “I believe you.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s today.” I picked the pan back up. “Here’s what I want. Not from tonight. From now.”
“Anything.”
“Tonight you find your daughter and you tell her the truth. The whole thing. Not the soft version.”
“Yes.”
“Then you show me. Not a card. Not a text on my birthday. You show me for a year.” I looked at her. “I’m not going to beg to be in that girl’s life. I’ve buried a husband and a mother, and I’ve got a few good years left, and I’d like to spend them in the kitchen, not on the porch.”
Denise’s chin came up. “How long is a year?”
“Twelve months,” I said. “Same as everybody else’s.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
Deb started to clap and I put my hand out, and she stopped.
*
Mia walked me to the car with her cap still on her head and her gown unzipped over her shorts.
“Grandma.”
“Mm.”
“Did you know? All of that?”
“Some of it.”
She looked back across the yard. Denise hadn’t moved from the grill. She was standing there with her hands empty at her sides.
“I’m mad at her,” Mia said.
“You’re allowed.”
“She told me you didn’t want me.”
I stopped walking.
“She told me you said I was a lot of work.”
I put the pan on the roof of the Buick and stood there a second.
“Two years,” I said. “I went out to the mailbox every day like a fool. Every single day, Mia. You know what I was getting? Ads for hearing aids.”
She laughed and then she cried, and it came out at the same time, the way it does when you’re eighteen.
“Honey, I’m going to say one thing and then we’re going to stop talking about it,” I said. “Your mother has work to do. That work is hers. You don’t have to help her do it, and you don’t have to punish her for it. You just get to be eighteen.”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
*
Denise came to the porch eight days later. She didn’t bring anything.
She sat on the step. I stayed in the chair.
“I told her Wednesday night,” she said. “It took about an hour. She threw a hairbrush.”
“Good aim?”
“Very good aim.”
We sat a while.
“She’s not speaking to me,” Denise said.
“That’s between the two of you.”
“I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You don’t fix two years in a week.” I rocked once. “You fix it on a Tuesday. Then you fix it on the next Tuesday.”
She nodded.
“I was so mad at you for so long that I forgot what I was mad about,” she said. “I just kept being mad because it was easier than missing you.”
“That’s the truest thing you’ve said to me in ten years.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I’m not done being hurt. I’m just done being alone.”
She put her head down on her knees for a minute. Then she got up.
“Coffee?” I said.
“Please.”
*
Mia came every Sunday after that. Some weeks Denise came with her and some weeks she didn’t, and both were fine.
In August, Mia showed up with a grocery bag and set it on my counter.
“What’s this.”
“Fudge stuff. You promised.”
So we made it the way we always had, with the wooden spoon worn flat on one side, her hand over mine on the handle the way it used to be, and then her hand alone because she’s eighteen and doesn’t need mine anymore.
We didn’t talk about her mother. We didn’t talk about much.
When it was done she scraped the pot and licked the spoon and said, “Same as always.”
“Same as always.”
Then she wanted to drive, because she’s eighteen and she has her license now and she wanted to prove something to somebody, probably herself.
She slid in behind the wheel and reached across and pushed the passenger door open from the inside.
“Get in, Grandma,” she said. “I’m driving.”
So I got in.