My boyfriend’s mother held up the peacock-blue wrap I’d spent eleven weeks and $214 of yarn knitting for her, turned it so all nine of us could see, and said, “I can’t stand this color. I told my son I loved it so I’d find out which one of his girlfriends would fall for it.” Then she told us what the test was really for.
Diego and I had been together fourteen months.
He’d already put a deposit on a two-bedroom for us, starting in March.
His parents were the last thing standing between me and that lease, and we both knew it.
“She’s going to grill you,” he said in the car. “Just be you.”
Then, at a red light, he remembered something.
“Oh, and she’s obsessed with peacock blue. Like, her whole closet.”
So that weekend I went and bought the yarn.
Eleven weeks.
Every night after my shift, on the couch, with a podcast about shipwrecks playing that I never actually followed.
I’d never made anything that big in my life.
I put it in a white box with white tissue, and I wrote a card that said I hoped she’d wear it on cold mornings.
Sunday dinner was at his parents’ house in Bloomington.
His mom, Francesca, opened the door and looked at my shoes before she looked at my face.
His dad, Arturo, shook my hand and barely said hello.
His aunt Beatriz was there with her husband Rory, and his cousin Caitlyn with her husband Vijay, and their daughter Gemma, who was twelve and on her phone the whole time.
Nine at the table.
Everybody was nice through the pot roast.
Arturo kept turning his wedding ring with his thumb.
After dessert, Diego bumped my knee under the table.
“Kinga, give it to her now,” he said.
I set the box next to her plate.
She took her time with the tissue.
Then she lifted it out by two corners and held it up high, like somebody showing a lot at an auction.
The table went quiet.
She smiled.
Then the smile was gone.
“Peacock blue,” she said, looking at Diego. “Did you tell her that?”
“You told me,” Diego said. “You’ve said it for years.”
“I know what I told you.” She laid it across her lap like a napkin. “I said it to you. Not to HER.”
Nobody moved.
“Every girl he brings home, I give him one thing about me that isn’t true,” she said. “The ones who want to know me ask ME. The ones who only want him ask HIM.”
She pointed her fork at Vijay.
“Vijay asked me. He showed up with those little lemon candies I like. That’s how I knew.”
Vijay looked at his plate.
Beatriz laughed into her wine.
“Eleven weeks, she knitted,” Francesca said to the table. “Eleven weeks of being told what to do and doing it.”
My face went hot from the collar up.
“I wanted to make you something you’d actually wear,” I said.
“Oh, and you’ll be very good at that,” she said. “Doing what you’re told. For him. For his money.”
His money.
Diego fixes furnaces. He makes $58,000 a year.
Then she said the part I still hear when I’m trying to fall asleep.
“Arturo and I have FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS put aside for Diego’s down payment,” she said. “For when he brings home a wife who passes. Not a girl who knits whatever he tells her to.”
She folded the wrap in half, then in half again.
“Bea, you want this for the back seat? For when you take the dogs to the groomer?”
Beatriz reached across Rory and took it.
Gemma took a picture.
“Mom,” Diego said. “STOP.”
“I’m being honest with her, sweetheart. Somebody in this family should be.”
I stood up. My chair scraped the hardwood.
“I didn’t know it was a test,” I said. “I thought it was dinner.”
“Everything’s a test,” she said. “You’d know that if you’d asked.”
That’s when Arturo put his fork down.
He hadn’t said ten words all night.
He was looking at the wrap in Beatriz’s hands. Not at me. Not at his wife.
“Fran,” he said.
She didn’t turn around.
“Fran. Tell her about my mother’s scarf.”
Francesca’s hand went flat on the tablecloth.
Beatriz stopped laughing.
“Arturo, not at the table,” Francesca said.
“You made it the table’s business,” he said. “So tell them. Tell them what color it was, and what my mother DID WITH IT in front of my whole family in 1989.”
Christmas, 1989
Francesca didn’t say anything.
So Arturo did.
“It was that color,” he said, and he pointed his knife at the wrap in Beatriz’s lap. “Peacock blue. Fran knitted my mother a scarf for Christmas. It took her the whole fall.”
Beatriz put her glass down.
“My mother held it up by two corners in her living room on Pruitt Street,” he said. “Forty people at that party. My whole family. And she said, ‘I can’t stand this color. I told my son I loved it so I’d find out which girl would fall for it.'”
He said it flat, like he’d read it off a card.
“Then she tied it around Parker’s neck and put him out in the yard.”
Caitlyn said, “Who’s Parker?”
“The dog,” Arturo said. “Parker was the dog.”
Nobody laughed. Not even Beatriz.
I was still standing. My napkin had fallen on the floor by my chair, and I bent down and picked it up, because my hands needed a job. I folded it into a square. Then a smaller square.
Diego was looking at his mother like she was somebody he’d met in a parking lot.
“Mom,” he said. “Is that true?”
Francesca didn’t look at him. She looked at Arturo, down the whole length of the table, past the gravy boat and the pie plate with one slice left in it.
“You sat right there,” she said. “In 1989. You sat on your mother’s couch with a plate on your knees.”
“I know,” Arturo said.
“You didn’t say one word.”
“I know, Fran.”
“And now you want to say it. Now. In front of Bea. In front of Gemma.”
Gemma lowered her phone a couple of inches.
I sat back down. I don’t know why. My legs did it.
Rory reached over and moved the pie plate away from Beatriz’s elbow, like that was the emergency.
The clock over the sideboard said nine-fifteen. Diego told me later it had run four minutes fast since he was in grade school and nobody had ever fixed it.
Francesca stood up. She put both hands on the back of her chair.
Then she smiled at her husband, and it was the same smile she’d given the wrap.
“Your mother was right about me, Arturo,” she said. “Wasn’t she?”
Week six
I want to tell you about week six, because that’s where I should have heard it.
Week six was a Thursday. The wrap was about half done, draped across my knees on the couch, and the shipwreck podcast was on some ship that sank off Nova Scotia with a load of molasses. I was on a row of the border I’d already torn out twice.
Diego came over with the lease.
He’d printed it at work. He laid it on my coffee table and put his keys on top of it so it wouldn’t curl, and he showed me where he’d signed. The deposit was $1,850. He’d paid it out of his own savings without asking me for half.
“March first,” he said. “You can paint the second bedroom whatever you want.”
Then he picked up the end of the wrap and held it to the lamp.
“She’s going to lose her mind,” he said.
“In a good way?”
“In a good way. You should see her hall closet. It’s like a peacock exploded in there.”
I asked him what else she liked. Flowers, music, anything. I wanted to have something to talk about at the table besides the yarn.
He thought about it.
“Honestly? Don’t ask her a bunch of questions,” he said. “She hates that. She likes it when you just know.”
So I didn’t ask. I knitted.
Week ten was my birthday. Twenty-nine. My friend Monika had a table booked at the Thai place on Kirkwood, and I texted her at six o’clock that I wasn’t coming, because I had about four feet of fringe left and the dinner was in a week.
My mom called at eight. I put her on speaker and kept going.
“You’re doing all this for a woman you’ve never met?” she said.
“I’m doing it for Diego.”
“Mm,” my mom said. That was all.
I finished at one in the morning, on my birthday, alone, and I laid it out across the floor and walked around it in my socks. It was the best thing I’d ever made.
Then Sunday came, and Francesca opened the door and looked at my shoes.
She took my jacket herself. She didn’t hand it to Diego.
She opened the hall closet only as wide as she needed to, and I saw the sleeves inside before she got it hung. Blue. Coat after coat of that same blue, a whole rail of it. Then she shut the door with her hip.
She was wearing a gray sweater to dinner.
I remember thinking she saved the blue for good days. I remember hoping I’d be one.
That was where I’d been, eleven weeks, all of it, when she stood up at the head of the table and asked Arturo her question.
He didn’t answer.
She waited maybe five seconds. Then she pushed her chair in, very neatly, and walked out of the dining room and up the stairs.
A door shut on the second floor.
The kitchen sink
Diego went up after her.
“Stay here,” he said to me, with his hand on my shoulder. “Two minutes.”
I’ve been raised a certain way. When something terrible happens at a table, you clear it. So I stood up and started stacking plates, and Caitlyn started stacking plates too, and neither of us said anything to each other.
Arturo went out the back door without his coat.
The kitchen was yellow and too warm. The dishwasher was already full of the lunch dishes. I ran the water in the sink and started on the roasting pan, because it was there.
Beatriz came in behind me with her glass and the bottle.
She leaned on the counter next to the coffee maker and watched me scrub.
“You don’t have to do that, honey,” she said.
“I know.”
She filled her glass. I think it was her third. I’d been counting without meaning to, the way you count anything when you’re scared.
“She did it to Monika,” she said. “The one before you. Not your Monika, I’m sure. Different Monika.”
I didn’t tell her my friend’s name was Monika. It didn’t matter.
“Tulips,” Beatriz said. “Fran told Diego she loved tulips. That girl brought two dozen. Purple. Fran put them in the trash in front of her. Not even the garage. The kitchen trash, right there.”
She pointed at a white can by the pantry.
“And the one before that, the redhead from Indianapolis, it was a perfume. Some French thing. Fran said it gave her headaches. It didn’t, she’s worn it since high school.”
“How many?” I said.
“Since he was nineteen? Four. Five with you.” She drank. “Caitlyn’s first boyfriend too. He got told she collected those little spoons. You know, from states.”
I scrubbed the same corner of the pan.
“Everybody at that table knew,” I said.
“Knew what she does? Sure.”
“And Diego?”
Beatriz laughed. It was the same laugh she’d laughed into her wine.
“Diego thinks his mother’s a little hard to buy for,” she said. “That’s all he’s ever thought. Every girl he brought home just turned out to be wrong for him. That’s how it looked from where he was sitting.”
“You could’ve told him.”
“Honey. She’s my sister.”
Then she got quieter, and she looked at the ceiling, at the room above us.
“I didn’t know about the scarf,” she said. “I want you to know that. Thirty-seven years, I never heard about any scarf.”
“She never told you?”
“Fran tells me everything after two glasses. Everything. Her blood pressure. What she spends at Kohl’s. She told me about the lemon drops before she told anybody, she keeps them in every coat pocket she owns.” Beatriz shook her head. “She never told me about a scarf.”
I turned the water off.
“Where’s my wrap?” I said.
“It’s in the Buick. Rory put it in the back seat.”
“Can I have it back?”
She looked at me like I’d asked her for her purse.
“She gave it to me, honey,” she said. “Don’t make it a whole thing.”
Lemon candies
I took the trash out because there was a bag of it by the back door and I needed a reason to be outside.
It was cold. Not cold enough to see your breath, but close.
Arturo wasn’t on the porch. I could see his shape at the far end of the yard, by the fence, with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing.
Vijay was on the steps.
He had his coat on and a tin in his hand, one of those round metal tins, and he was unwrapping something yellow. He saw me and stopped.
“You want one?” he said. “They’re Aunt Fran’s. The lemon ones.”
“No. Thank you.”
I put the trash in the can and stood there with my arms crossed.
He put the candy in his mouth anyway. Then he took it back out and wrapped it up in the paper again, like he’d changed his mind about being the kind of person who could eat it right now.
“I’m sorry about in there,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It kind of is.”
I waited.
“Six years ago,” he said. “Thanksgiving. I was the new one. Caitlyn’s mom had already decided I was fine, but Fran’s the one you have to get past. Everybody knows that.”
“And you asked her what she liked.”
He didn’t answer right away. He turned the tin over in his hands. It had a picture of a lighthouse on the lid.
“That’s the story,” he said.
“That’s what she said at the table.”
“That’s what she’s said for six years. To everybody.” He looked at the kitchen window, where you could see Beatriz’s back. “She tells people I’m the only one who ever did it right. She says it at Christmas. She said it at Gemma’s First Communion.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I never asked her anything.”
I didn’t say anything back. I don’t think I could have.
“I never said one word to her before that dinner,” Vijay said. “Not on the phone. Not anywhere. I was too scared of her.”
“Then how did you know about the candies?”
He opened his mouth.
The storm door banged open behind me and Caitlyn leaned out, with Gemma’s coat over her arm.
“Vij,” she said. “We’re going. Now.”
He stood up. He put the tin in his coat pocket. He went past me without looking at me, and Caitlyn held the door for him, and her eyes went to me and stayed there a second too long.
The storm door swung shut on its spring.
I stood on the porch by myself.
At the bottom of the yard, Arturo turned around and started walking back toward the house.
The Buick
Inside, the front hall was full of coats and nobody leaving.
Caitlyn was zipping Gemma’s jacket. Rory was holding the Buick keys. Beatriz was finding her other glove. Everybody had decided to go and nobody had gone, because the person who decides when people go in that house was still upstairs.
I went to Rory.
“I’d like my wrap back, please,” I said.
He looked at Beatriz.
“Rory, don’t,” Beatriz said. “Honey, I told you. She gave it to me. You don’t come into somebody’s house and take back what got given.”
“I gave it to her.”
“And she gave it to me.” Beatriz pulled the glove on. “That’s how a gift works. It’s not yours anymore once it’s out of the box.”
Rory looked at the keys in his hand. He didn’t move them.
That was when Diego came down the stairs.
He came down slow, one hand on the rail, and he didn’t look at anybody until he got to the bottom. His face was blotchy the way it gets when he’s been not crying for a long time.
“She won’t come out,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“She talked through the door.”
He took my hand. His was freezing, even though the house was warm.
“She says it’s done,” he said. “The money. She says if I walk out of here with you tonight, the forty thousand goes to Caitlyn and Vijay. For their addition. She says at least that’s going to somebody who passed.”
Caitlyn stopped with Gemma’s zipper halfway up.
“Mom,” she said. “I mean, Aunt Fran. She said that?”
“Through the door,” Diego said.
Vijay was standing behind Caitlyn by the coat hooks. He had his hand in his pocket on that tin. He looked at the floor.
Beatriz put her hand on Diego’s arm.
“Sweetheart, she’s upset. She doesn’t mean it.”
“She means it,” Diego said. “She said she’d call the bank in the morning. She said she’s not a test you can study for.”
Then he looked at me.
“We’re going,” he said. “I’m going to go warm up the car. You get your coat.”
“Diego,” Beatriz said.
He went out the front door. It didn’t slam. He closed it carefully, the way you close a door on a sleeping baby.
The cold came in around our feet and stayed.
The hall closet
My jacket was in the hall closet. Francesca had put it there herself.
So I opened it.
There’s a light in there on a pull chain. I pulled it.
It was all blue. All of it. I’d seen sleeves at the door, and I’d thought, okay, a few coats. It was a whole rail. A long wool coat with big buttons. A raincoat. A quilted vest. A fleece zip-up like the ones they give you at a bank. Two cardigans on the same hanger. A blue umbrella hooked over the rod by its handle. Rain boots on the floor, blue, with mud dried on the toes.
Peacock blue, every single one. The exact color. I’d matched the yarn to a picture on my phone for half an hour at the craft store.
My jacket was squashed at the far end, black, the only thing in there that wasn’t hers.
I reached for it.
“Top shelf,” Arturo said behind me.
He’d come in from the yard. His face was red from the cold and he still didn’t have his coat.
I looked up.
There were hat boxes, a bag of light bulbs, a sewing kit. And on the end, flat, a big freezer bag, the gallon kind, zipped shut. Something blue was folded inside it.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I didn’t want to. I did anyway.
I took it down and held it under the bulb.
It was a scarf. A long one. Peacock blue, gone a little soft and pale where it had been folded the same way for years. The stitches at one end were tight and small and even. The stitches at the other end were loose and big and wandering, and you could see exactly where somebody had learned to knit while she was knitting it.
I know that, because the first foot of my wrap looks the same. I backed it out once and then I left it in, because it was the honest part.
“She learned on that,” Arturo said. “From a library book. September to Christmas.”
I didn’t say anything.
“After everybody left that night, she went out into my mother’s yard in the dark,” he said. “She took it off Parker. She brought it inside and washed it in my mother’s kitchen sink. With dish soap. My mother was in bed.”
He turned his ring with his thumb.
“I stood in the kitchen doorway and I didn’t help her,” he said. “I didn’t help her with that either.”
“Why does she wear the color?” I said.
“She bought the raincoat that spring.” He nodded at it. “Then the boots. Then all of it. Thirty-seven years. My mother came to this house for every Christmas until she passed, and Fran met her at that door in that blue every time.”
He looked at the scarf in my hands.
“She never wore that one. Not once. It’s been in a bag up there since we moved in.”
“And she tells everybody she can’t stand it.”
“Tonight she did.” He took a breath. “Tonight was the first time I ever heard her say my mother’s words out loud. Word for word. I sat there and I heard my mother come out of my wife.”
Somewhere outside, Diego’s truck started.
I folded the scarf the way it had been folded. I put it back in the bag and zipped it and I put it back on the shelf at the end, exactly where it was.
Arturo watched me do it.
“Diego said she hates being asked things,” I said.
“Diego’s thirty-one,” Arturo said. “Nobody’s asked her anything in this house since he was born.”
He pulled the light chain. The closet went dark.
“She’ll come down for coffee,” he said. “She always does. Go ask her what color she likes.”
The ninth chair
I went outside first.
Diego had the truck running in the driveway, behind the Buick. I knocked on his window and held up one finger, and he rolled it down.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“Kinga.”
“Five minutes. Please.”
He looked at me for a while. Then he turned the truck off.
When we went back in, Rory was still in the front hall with the keys.
I held out my hand to him.
He didn’t look at Beatriz this time. He put the keys in my palm.
“Rory,” Beatriz said.
I went out to the Buick and got the wrap off the back seat. It still had dog hair on it, white and short, from whatever dogs went to the groomer in that car. I picked off what I could on the way back up the walk.
Francesca was at the dining room table.
She’d come down. She had a cup of coffee in front of her, and her gray sweater, and her face fixed back the way it had been at the door. Everybody else was standing around the edges of the room with their coats half on, like a fire drill nobody had called off.
Her chair was at the head. Mine was still pulled out at the side, the ninth chair, where I’d left it.
I didn’t sit in it.
I laid the wrap on the table in front of her, folded the way she’d folded it.
“What’s your favorite color, Francesca?” I said.
She looked at the wrap. Then at Arturo, who was in the doorway behind me. Then at the hall, and the closet door, which I had left open about an inch.
“Don’t,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You went in my closet.” She put her cup down. “Arturo. You let her go in my closet.”
“I sent her,” Arturo said.
“In my house. At my table. You bring her in here, Diego, you bring a girl in here who goes through people’s things and asks them cute little questions like she’s at a job interview.” She was talking to me and to Diego both, going back and forth. “You don’t know me. You don’t get to ask me anything. You had eleven weeks to find out one true thing about me and you didn’t, you went and did what he said. Every one of you does what he says.”
“Fran,” Beatriz said.
“No. No, Bea. Everybody wants to talk tonight.” Her voice was getting higher and faster. “You know what she said to me? After the yard? His mother? She came into the kitchen in her robe in the morning and she said, a girl who does what she’s told will do just fine in this family. And I did. I did fine. I did fine for twenty-two years at that woman’s table. I made her ham. I drove her to the eye doctor. I did every single thing I was told.”
Nobody moved.
“So don’t come in here and ask me what I like,” she said. “Nobody asks. Nobody’s ever asked. The only person who ever came through that door and asked me one question about myself is standing right there, and he’s getting the forty thousand dollars, and good.”
She pointed across the room at Vijay.
I turned and looked at him.
“Vijay,” I said. “Tell her.”
He had his hand in his coat pocket. He took it out with the tin in it, the lighthouse one. He held it like it was something he’d found on the ground.
“I didn’t, Aunt Fran,” he said.
Francesca stared at him.
“I didn’t ask you,” he said. “I never asked you anything. Caitlyn told me about the lemon drops the night before. Bea told Caitlyn at Easter. I bought them at the Kroger on Third Street on the way over.”
“Vij,” Caitlyn said. “Oh my God.”
“She’s going to give us forty thousand dollars for it, Cait. I’m not doing that.”
Francesca looked at her sister.
Beatriz had her glove in her hand. She put it down on the sideboard very slowly.
“Fran,” she said. “I was just trying to help the kid.”
“You told them.”
“It was lemon drops. It was nothing. You’d had some wine, you told me, I told Cait, it was nothing.”
“Six years,” Francesca said. “Six years I’ve been telling everybody at every Christmas that one boy did it right.”
She didn’t say anything after that for a while.
Gemma was standing by the sideboard with her phone. She held it out toward me, screen first. It was a picture of the trash folder, with the photo she’d taken of Francesca holding up the wrap.
“I deleted it,” Gemma said.
Caitlyn put her hand over her mouth.
Diego came around the table and stood next to me. He didn’t touch me. He just stood there.
“Keep it, Mom,” he said. “The money. All of it. Give it to whoever you want.”
Francesca looked at him like he’d slapped her.
“That money is for you.”
“Then it’s for me to say no to.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he let it. “We’ve got a lease. We’ll pay it ourselves. I’m not passing anything.”
She turned back to me. Her eyes were wet and her mouth was hard, both at once.
I waited for her to answer my question.
She didn’t.
Nobody answered it for her, either. Not Arturo, not Bea. I’d have known if anyone did.
So I picked up the wrap. I folded it one more time, small, the way you fold something to carry it a long way. The white box was still on the sideboard where somebody had set it, with the tissue crumpled inside and my card under it.
“That was a gift,” Francesca said.
“You gave it to Bea,” I said.
I put the wrap in the box and pressed the lid down, and I handed Rory back his keys on the way out the door.
March
The two-bedroom has a furnace closet off the kitchen. Diego took the front panel off the first night we had the keys, with his flashlight in his teeth, and changed the filter before we’d unpacked one box of dishes.
“Landlord hasn’t touched this in two years,” he said. That was his housewarming.
We paid the first month ourselves. We’ll pay all of them ourselves. Diego worked it out on the back of an envelope, and if nothing goes wrong we’ll have a down payment of our own in about five years. Something will go wrong. We’ll see.
He hasn’t been back to Bloomington.
Arturo calls him on Sundays. They talk about the Pacers and about furnaces, mostly. Once, at the end, Diego said, “Is she okay?” and listened for a long time and said, “Okay,” and that’s all I know.
The second bedroom is still white. I haven’t decided.
The first Saturday in March, I put the shipwreck podcast on. Some steamer that went down in Lake Superior in a storm.
I got the white box out of the hall closet.
I sat on the couch and found the end of the yarn at the fringe, where I’d woven it in at one in the morning on my birthday. I worked it loose with a crochet hook. Then I pulled.
It comes apart a lot faster than it goes together. A row goes in a couple of seconds.
I wound it around my hand as it came, and when my hand got full I slid it off and started another ball. After an hour I had four of them on the cushion next to me, peacock blue, a little kinked from being knitted.
Diego came in from the furnace closet and wiped his hands on his jeans.
I held up what was left of it by two corners, the way she had, so he could see.
About a third of a wrap. The ugly first foot was still there, the loose stitches, the part where I’d learned.
“You’re taking the whole thing apart?” he said.
“Most of it.”
“What are you going to make?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m going to keep that end, though.”
He sat down next to me and picked up one of the balls and turned it over in his hand.
“Is this for anybody?” he said.
“It’s for me,” I said, and I found the end again and kept pulling.
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to somebody who’s ever knitted for a person who never asked.
Family drama seems to bring out the boldest tests – see what happened when one woman’s in-laws moved into her house in “She Moved Her Whole Family Into My $1.2 Million House”. For more tense showdowns with difficult mothers, read “I Counted Thirty-Eight Beats Under Her Mother’s Jaw” and “His Mom Took My Chair”.
