Then she said, very evenly:
“I’m tired of watching Grandma get lied to.”
“Chloe—”
“I love her too, Mom. That’s all I’m saying.”
She stood up, kissed the top of my head like I was the teenager, and went inside.
I sat out there a while longer, looking at the spot on Franklin where his taillights disappeared every week.
Source: Unsplash
Her Seventy-Second Birthday, and the Chocolate Pie She Made From Scratch
The following Sunday, my mother fussed with her hair in the hallway mirror three separate times.
“You look gorgeous,” I told her.
“I look like a woman who’s trying too hard.”
“Grandma,” Chloe called from the couch without looking up from her phone, “you look like a woman who’s trying exactly hard enough. There’s a difference and you’re on the right side of it.”
The doorbell went at six.
Richard stood there with a dozen roses in one hand, a wrapped box in the other, and that leather tote tucked under his arm the way it always was — like it had been surgically attached at some point in his early thirties.
“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
And my mother lit up like a porch at dusk, and I’ll tell you honestly, it is very hard to stay suspicious of a man when your mother looks at him like that.
Dinner was wonderful.
He told a story about mistaking a zucchini for a cucumber at the gardening club and slicing it raw into a salad that nearly ended a man named Doug. He did the voices. Chloe laughed in spite of herself.
My mother laughed so hard she snorted, which she had not done since my father was alive, and I had to look at the ceiling for a second.
Then she got up and brought out the pie.
“Chocolate,” she announced, setting it down. “I made it because my boyfriend told me it was his favorite.”
She said my boyfriend like a woman trying out a word she wasn’t sure she was allowed to have.
And Richard’s face did something complicated.
Grateful. And then guilty. And then trapped.
He looked at his watch.
7:26.
“Grace.” His voice came out wrong. “Grace, honey, I am so sorry. I have to go.”
The room went completely quiet.
My mother’s smile didn’t disappear all at once. It faded in stages, the way a light on a dimmer goes down.
“Can’t you stay ten minutes? Richard, it’s my birthday.”
