My daughter made me swear I’d be kind to her new fiancé at dinner.
Four hours before he was due, a man holding one $89 bottle of wine clicked his tongue behind my loaded cart and said, “Lady, you’ll take a year, and some of us have lives.”
I stepped aside, kept my mouth shut, and then I read the name on his card.
Jenna hadn’t brought a man to my table since her father’s funeral. Six years.
“Please, Mom,” she’d said on the phone that morning.
“He’s nervous. Just be easy on him.”
So I was easy. I bought everything.
A three-pound chuck roast. Red potatoes.
Two bags of carrots, because I always scorch the first batch.
And a jar of green cardamom pods for Terrence’s cake.
Jenna still asks for that cake every birthday, even though I’ve never once gotten it as tall as he did.
The cart was so full the bread rode on top of the eggs.
Lane four had one cashier. I was next.
Then the sighing started behind me.
Not one sigh. A whole run of them, each with a little click of the tongue at the end, regular as a turn signal.
I looked back.
Tall, early thirties, gray quarter-zip, a watch heavy enough to tip his wrist.
He was holding a bottle of red by the neck like he planned to swing it.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You’re going to be here a YEAR. I’ve got one thing.”
I faced front again.
“Seriously?” He said it to the woman behind him, not to me.
“She’s going to dig out coupons. Watch.”
The woman behind him studied her shoes.
The cashier’s tag said KINGA.
She couldn’t have been older than twenty-two, and she caught my eye and pulled a face that meant sorry.
“Some of us have somewhere to be tonight,” he said.
“SOME OF US HAVE A LIFE.”
I’m fifty-four. I sat beside Terrence for eleven weeks while he got smaller in a rented bed.
My face went hot anyway.
I said nothing back.
I pulled the cart back two feet and waved him through.
He didn’t thank me.
He stood the bottle on the belt and slapped a black card on the reader before Kinga had even scanned it.
“Today, sweetheart,” he said.
$89.99 came up on the screen.
The reader beeped wrong.
He sighed again, louder, and turned the card over to tap it instead.
That’s when I saw it.
Raised silver letters along the bottom.
COLLIN T BURCH.
My hand closed on the cart handle.
There are a lot of Collins in the world.
That’s what I told myself.
Then he lifted his phone to his ear.
“Babe, I got the wine,” he said.
“Yeah. The eighty-nine-dollar one. Your mom’s going to pretend she can taste the difference.”
He laughed at whatever she said back.
“No, I’m being nice. I’ll be nice.”
He walked out past me without turning his head.
Kinga rang me up in silence. $212.40.
She bagged the cardamom by itself, in its own little bag, like she could tell.
“You okay, ma’am?” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I have a roast to make.”
I drove home through Toledo with both hands on the wheel.
I didn’t call Jenna.
What would I even say?
Your fiancé was rude to me at the store?
She’d say I was hunting for a reason.
She’d say I would never like anybody after Dad.
So I cooked.
I browned the roast. I cut the carrots.
I crushed the cardamom with the back of a spoon on a cutting board, the way Terrence did it, because in thirty years we never bought the right tool.
At 6:15 Jenna texted.
“He’s so nervous lol. Be sweet. Love you.”
I set four plates. Then I put one back in the cupboard.
Habit.
At 7:02 the doorbell rang.
Jenna got to the door first.
She’d come over early to help and hadn’t helped with anything.
I heard her laugh in the hall.
Then a man’s voice.
The same voice.
I came down the hall with the dish towel still in both hands.
He was standing on my mat holding that bottle by the neck.
His eyes landed on my face.
For one second nothing on him moved at all.
Then he smiled with every tooth he had.
“Mrs. Cortez,” he said, and held the bottle out to me.
“Jenna warned me you take FOREVER with dessert. I hope it’s worth the wait.”
Jenna swatted his arm. “Collin. Be nice.”
“I am being nice,” he said.
He was looking right at me when he said it.
The bottle on my counter
I took the wine with the towel around it.
“We met this afternoon,” I said.
Jenna’s hand stayed on his arm. “You did?”
“At the store.”
Collin stepped across my mat.
“Your mother let me cut in front. Small world.”
He gave her the version that would fit on a thank-you card.
I stood there with the other version and a bottle I could’ve exchanged for a week’s groceries.
“She had a full cart,” he said.
“I had this. We worked it out.”
“We didn’t speak much,” I said.
His eyes went to mine.
Jenna laughed. “Well, now you can.”
She shut the door behind him.
My daughter had spent the afternoon making that door into an entrance to the rest of her life.
I could practically hear the ribbon being cut.
Collin put his hand on her back.
“Something smells good.”
“The roast,” she said. “Mom’s been cooking all day.”
“All day? You shouldn’t have.”
I nearly told him he was right.
Instead, I went into the kitchen and put the bottle beside the cake.
He followed Jenna as she pointed out the dining room, though there wasn’t much to tour.
You could stand in the hall and see almost everything I owned that wasn’t a bra.
“Do you have a corkscrew?” he said.
“In the drawer beside you.”
He opened the wrong drawer.
“The other side.”
“Ah. We’ll get there.”
Jenna touched his elbow again. The same small movement as at the door.
I pulled the roast from the oven.
“Leave the wine closed a minute,” I said. “I need room.”
He put down the corkscrew.
“Of course.”
He could say those two words beautifully when Jenna stood between us.
She reached around me for the serving bowl.
Her engagement ring clicked against its edge, and she held her hand up to check the stone.
“Don’t start without me,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”
That was what I’d wanted that morning, too.
My daughter at my table, telling me things without checking whether they would hurt.
Collin leaned against the counter while she carried the bowl out.
“You could’ve said who you were,” he said.
“You didn’t ask.”
He straightened.
Jenna called from the dining room, “Mom, where do you want everybody?”
Before I could answer, Collin picked up the bottle.
“Wherever I’m least likely to get into trouble.”
He smiled toward her voice.
The wine was still in his hand when he took Terrence’s chair.
The place beside the window
Jenna had moved his plate there before the bell.
She’d arrived with her coat open and her phone in her hand, talking before both feet were inside.
I was putting the cake on its plate.
“Don’t do that thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“Ask a question and then wait so long after he answers.”
“That’s called listening.”
“Mom.”
I put down the cake. It leaned a little toward the window.
Terrence’s cakes stood up straight.
Mine always looked as though they’d heard something in the next room.
“What am I allowed to ask?”
“Anything normal.”
“Does he eat potatoes?”
She laughed then. She still had that laugh before he arrived.
“He eats potatoes.”
“Good. We’ve found common ground.”
She walked around the table and moved one setting to the chair beside the window.
“Is this okay?”
Terrence used to sit there because the floor sloped and he could blame the table when he spilled something.
I could’ve told her that. Instead, I said yes.
Jenna pulled out the chair, then pushed it back.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want him thinking there’s some test.”
“There isn’t.”
She held the back of the chair a moment longer.
I wanted her to sit down and stay twenty-four, before the hospital calls and the funeral shoes.
That was an ugly little wish. She was thirty.
She wanted somebody to come through the door for her.
She put her phone beside the plates.
“He’s booked the restaurant.”
“For what?”
“The wedding dinner. I told you we liked it.”
“You said you were going to look.”
“He went back. The room was available.”
She showed me the confirmation on her screen. A deposit of $1,200.00.
Under it, the part about no refunds.
“That’s a lot to put down before we’ve met.”
“He doesn’t drag things out.”
She said it as a good thing.
I wiped a bit of icing off the plate with my finger.
Jenna used to wait beside her father for that job.
He’d give her the bowl even when she was too old to need an excuse to lick a spoon.
“Do you like the room?”
“It’s nice.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Her phone went dark.
“Please don’t.”
I took my finger away from the icing.
“I said I’d give you three thousand toward the wedding. I meant it.”
“I know.”
“But you can take your time.”
“Everybody keeps saying that.”
I hadn’t heard about everybody. I didn’t ask.
She was already drawing her coat around herself, though the kitchen was hot.
“Where’s your overnight bag?” I said.
“In my car. I wasn’t sure.”
“You don’t have to be sure. Your room’s still upstairs.”
She smiled at that, but only with her mouth.
Then her phone lit up. Collin wanted to know whether she was ready.
She typed with both thumbs, stopped, and erased something.
“You used to just say you were coming home,” I said.
“I am home.”
“I meant for the night.”
“I know what you meant.”
There it was. My helpful mouth, making itself useful as a shovel.
I turned back to the cake.
“Stay if you want. Go if you want. Bring the bag in later.”
She came up beside me and leaned her head against my shoulder.
“Just give him a chance.”
I kissed her hair.
At the table now, Collin rested his elbows beside that same phone.
Jenna took the seat between us.
The first plate
Collin wanted the knife.
“I can do that,” he said as I brought in the roast.
“I’ve got it.”
“Let me earn my dinner.”
He stood, reached across, and took it before I could decide whether refusing would become the evening’s first incident.
I handed him the serving fork.
There are women who can make a man surrender a carving knife with one eyebrow.
Mine had apparently retired.
He cut across the roast.
Jenna moved her plate closer.
“Just a little for me.”
“You barely ate lunch.”
“I had lunch.”
“Half a sandwich.”
“I’d like a little.”
He put two pieces on her plate.
“There. That’s not much.”
She looked down, then passed the plate toward me for potatoes.
I held the bowl out so she could serve herself.
“Thank you,” she said.
Collin cut his own portion.
“Your mother thinks I’m feeding you against your will.”
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
“I’m kidding.”
He used those words easily.
No pause to see whether anybody had enjoyed the first attempt before sending out another.
Jenna took one potato, then another.
“Mom makes these with the roast. They get all the good stuff.”
“My mother did them separately,” he said. “But these look fine.”
“High praise,” I said.
He laughed.
“There she is. Jenna said you had a sharp tongue.”
Jenna’s fork stopped.
“I said she was funny.”
“Same thing.”
“No,” she said. “I said funny.”
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it.
I put the bowl down harder than necessary.
I wanted him to be nervous.
I wanted some evidence that the man in the store had been a bad ten minutes in an otherwise decent life.
A stumble would’ve helped. A sincere question about the cake would’ve helped.
He sat in my husband’s chair like the warranty came with it.
“How was your afternoon?” Jenna said to me.
I looked at her.
“Busy.”
“Besides cooking.”
Collin chewed. He didn’t look up.
“The store was busy.”
“You got everything, though?”
“Everything and an education.”
He put down his fork.
“Are we doing the store?”
Jenna turned toward him.
“Doing what?”
“Your mother’s upset I went ahead.”
I set my knife beside my plate.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I’m upset about what you said.”
He leaned back.
Jenna looked from him to me. “What did he say?”
I could’ve made it smaller.
I’d been doing little jobs all day to keep this dinner standing.
One more wouldn’t have strained a muscle.
“He said I would take a year. He told the woman behind him I would dig out coupons.”
Collin gave a short laugh.
“Oh, come on.”
“He told the cashier, ‘Today, sweetheart.'”
“She couldn’t get the machine to work.”
“The bottle hadn’t been scanned.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Jenna, I had one item. Your mother had enough food for a shelter. I asked to go ahead, she let me, and now apparently we’re having a hearing.”
“I let you ahead because I wanted you away from me.”
Jenna pulled her hand out of his.
For a second, I thought she’d heard me.
Then she said, “Mom, why didn’t you tell me before he got here?”
The roast sat between us, cut badly, getting cold.
Collin picked up his fork.
“Yes,” he said. “Why wait until we’re all sitting down?”
The corkscrew
I stood to get the gravy.
It was already on the table.
Jenna pushed the bowl toward me without speaking. I sat back down.
There’s a special kind of embarrassment in being furious and unable to locate gravy.
“I didn’t want to decide who he was from one afternoon,” I said.
“Then don’t,” she said.
Collin turned his plate a little.
“Thank you.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
He lifted both hands.
“Fair enough.”
Jenna looked at me again.
“Did you know it was him at the store?”
“I saw his name on his card.”
“And you didn’t call?”
“I wanted to meet him here.”
“Well, you met him. He’s here.”
I put gravy on a potato I wasn’t going to eat.
Collin reached for the bottle.
“Let’s open this and start over.”
“Wait,” I said.
He stopped with his hand around the neck.
“For what?”
“I haven’t finished.”
“That’s becoming a theme.”
Jenna shut her eyes.
“Collin.”
“What? I’m trying to move past it.”
“Then say you’re sorry,” she said.
He put the bottle down.
“Rosemarie, I’m sorry if my impatience upset you.”
He got my first name right. I hadn’t offered it.
I wanted to accept.
I wanted it badly enough that I could’ve swallowed that little if whole and gone back for cake.
My daughter was sitting so straight her back didn’t touch the chair.
“Thank you,” I said.
Jenna’s shoulders dropped.
Then Collin added, “I honestly didn’t know you were Jenna’s mother.”
I looked at him.
“What difference would that make?”
He gave Jenna a look I couldn’t read without guessing, and I was done guessing generously.
“It means I would’ve introduced myself.”
“Would you still have called the cashier sweetheart?”
“That’s how I talk.”
“She was working.”
“And I was buying something.”
Jenna reached for her water.
“Can we please eat?”
We did. Or we moved things around, which looks much the same if you’re determined.
Collin praised the roast. He asked how long I’d lived in the house. I answered.
He asked whether keeping up with it was a lot for one person.
“It has good days,” I said. “So do I.”
Jenna smiled, and I held on to that smile like a fool holding a receipt for something already broken.
Then he picked up the corkscrew.
“Now?”
I nodded.
He set the point against the cork, stopped, and turned the label toward me.
“This is the one Jenna said you’d like.”
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“You said get something nice.”
“I said don’t bring anything.”
He laughed.
“Same thing when a woman says it.”
“No,” Jenna said.
He looked at her. She looked down at her plate.
I took a drink of water because my mouth was full of sentences that would end the dinner.
He pulled the point out without opening the bottle.
“You know what? We can save it. Wine on top of this mood probably isn’t a great idea.”
He put the corkscrew beside his plate.
Jenna asked for more carrots. I gave her the bowl.
“These are the good batch,” I said.
She laughed once, then covered it with a cough.
Collin looked at the carrots.
“What does that mean?”
“Mom always buys two bags.”
“Why?”
“In case the first ones burn.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to set a timer?”
Jenna put down the serving spoon.
“It’s just something we say.”
He gave her the same smile he’d given me at the door.
“Well, somebody will have to let me in on the jokes.”
I reached for the bread.
My hand brushed the corkscrew, and it rolled toward Jenna.
She caught it before it fell.
She laid it beside the bottle, beyond his reach.
Jenna’s fork
I carried the empty carrot bowl into the kitchen.
Jenna followed with her plate, though half her food remained on it.
“Don’t throw that out,” I said.
“I’m not.”
She stood beside the sink.
Collin stayed at the table, close enough to hear unless we lowered our voices.
I wouldn’t do that in my own kitchen. Jenna did.
“Please stop looking at him like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re waiting.”
I put the bowl down.
“For him to be kind? I suppose I am.”
Her eyes filled.
“He’s trying.”
“I accepted his apology.”
“And then you asked him another question.”
“It was a fair question.”
She pressed her lips together.
The fork on her plate shook against the china.
I took the plate from her. She let me.
This was the first thing she’d brought me all night that I knew what to do with.
“Jenna, look at me.”
“Don’t use that voice.”
“What voice?”
“The one from when I was little and you already knew what I did.”
I leaned against the counter.
My daughter had come home with a man and I was making her feel ten.
I hated that. I also hated what he’d done.
There wasn’t a cupboard big enough to put either thing away.
“I heard him on the phone,” I said.
She went still.
“Outside the store. He called you.”
“I know he called me.”
“He said I’d pretend to taste the difference.”
Her tears stopped short of falling.
“Mom.”
“He laughed.”
“I told him to stop.”
“I couldn’t hear you.”
“Then why are you saying it like I laughed with him?”
I hadn’t meant to. That didn’t make her wrong.
“I’m sorry.”
She wiped under one eye with the side of her finger.
“You could’ve called. You could’ve given me a minute to talk to him before this.”
I had an answer ready. Several.
None would change that she’d spent the hours before dinner expecting something I knew she wasn’t going to get.
“You’re right about that,” I said.
She stared at me, almost angry that I’d agreed too late.
Collin came to the doorway.
“Everything okay?”
Jenna turned toward him. “We need a minute.”
He leaned against the frame.
“Of course.”
He didn’t move.
I took her plate to the table.
When I came back, he was still there.
“She asked for a minute,” I said.
“And I’m giving her one.”
“Alone.”
His face changed at that. Just enough.
The smile went away before the rest of him had agreed to let it.
Jenna touched my wrist.
“Mom, don’t.”
He straightened.
“I should go.”
Nobody answered fast enough for him.
“I came here to meet your mother. I bought the wine. I tried to help. If everything out of my mouth is going to be picked apart, there’s no point.”
“I didn’t ask you to go,” Jenna said.
“You’re upset. She’s upset. I’m the reason, apparently.”
He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor.
It was a good performance of a man trying not to take up space.
He managed it while blocking my kitchen door.
Jenna stepped toward him.
“Don’t leave.”
There was my cost.
I’d spent the day hoping she’d bring somebody home.
Now she was begging him to stay because of me, and he knew it.
He looked past her.
“Can we finish dinner without another interrogation?”
I should’ve said we could finish dinner with manners.
I should’ve said a grown man could survive being asked about his own words.
Instead, I looked at Jenna’s wet face.
“Yes.”
He returned to the table.
Jenna stayed with me another second.
“Please don’t make me sorry I brought him.”
Then she followed him and shut the kitchen door between us.
The cake under the cover
I washed the roasting pan while they sat in the next room.
It needed soaking. I scrubbed it anyway.
The pan had done nothing wrong, but it was available.
Through the door, Collin said something I couldn’t make out.
Jenna answered, “I know.”
I turned off the water.
My cake stood beside the stove.
One edge had stuck when I took it out of the pan, so I’d put that side toward the wall.
A woman can conceal a lot with a plate turned correctly.
Apparently I’d mistaken that for a life skill.
I picked up the cake knife.
Then I put it down.
Jenna came back in carrying the other plates.
“We’re going to go,” she said.
I dried my hands.
“You haven’t had cake.”
“I know.”
“I can wrap some.”
She looked at it, then at me.
“Not tonight.”
That hurt more than the kitchen door. I won’t dress it up.
I’d crushed those pods thinking of her father’s hands and the sound she made as a child when he let her have the first piece.
I wanted to say she was punishing the wrong person.
I wanted to remind her who’d stayed.
I wanted to be so right that she couldn’t walk out.
All of that would’ve fit in one breath.
I’d have regretted it for the rest of my life.
“All right,” I said.
She put the plates beside the sink.
Collin came in behind her with the bottle.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said.
Perfect manners. At last. I could’ve framed them.
“You’re welcome.”
“We’ll try again when things aren’t so…” He moved his free hand.
“So what?” I said.
Jenna looked at me.
He lowered the hand.
“I know this is hard.”
“What is?”
“Meeting somebody new. Having a man in the house.”
I put the cake cover over the plate.
“You’ve been here less than an hour.”
“Jenna told me about her dad.”
“Her father’s name was Terrence.”
“I know his name.”
He said it with a little laugh, as though I’d corrected his pronunciation of a vegetable.
Jenna took his sleeve.
“Let’s just go.”
But he had found something he could say kindly that would still put me underneath it.
“I respect what you went through. I really do. But I can’t spend our marriage being measured against somebody who isn’t here.”
Jenna’s hand fell from his sleeve.
I gripped the edge of the counter.
“Our marriage,” he said again, looking at her now.
“We’re trying to build something.”
I wanted to say Terrence once ate a whole failed cake because Jenna made it and he couldn’t bear to tell her.
I wanted to say the rented bed never made him cruel to anyone.
I wanted to bring my husband into that kitchen and put him between my daughter and this man.
He couldn’t come.
Collin could say whatever he wanted about him, and I could only stand there getting red.
“Nobody asked you to be her father,” I said.
“No. But I’m not going to apologize forever because I’m not him.”
Jenna started crying then.
She put a hand over her mouth and turned away from both of us.
I reached for her.
Collin reached first.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”
She let him put his arm around her shoulders.
At the hall, she picked up her coat. He held it open.
She put one arm in, missed the other sleeve, and struggled with it while he kept talking.
“We should’ve done this somewhere neutral. I said that.”
She pulled the coat around herself.
I stood at the kitchen doorway with wet cuffs and dinner on my shirt.
The cake was covered. My daughter was leaving.
He’d used my husband to finish an argument he began in a grocery store.
Jenna took the overnight bag out of my reach by leaving it in her car.
Collin opened my front door.
“Ready?” he said.
She looked back at me.
The open door
I went into the hall.
Collin kept one hand on the door.
Jenna’s coat was caught under her bag strap, and she was trying to pull it free.
“Wait,” I said.
He looked at the ceiling.
“Rosemarie, I really think we’ve done enough.”
I wanted one more chance to explain.
I could feel myself reaching for the store again, the card, the cashier’s face.
I had enough evidence to ruin a dinner. I’d proved that much.
Jenna tugged at her strap.
I took the bag gently and lifted it off her shoulder so she could straighten her coat.
“You can come here,” I said.
“I’m here.”
“Tomorrow. Next week. After you marry him.”
Collin’s hand stopped moving on the doorknob.
She looked at me.
“Don’t.”
“Even if you marry him.”
Her face folded.
“Mom, please.”
I hadn’t understood until then how much she’d expected to lose that night.
I was standing beside the door of the house she’d grown up in, holding her bag as though I got to decide where she belonged.
I gave it back.
“I don’t like what happened. I won’t pretend I do. But you won’t lose me.”
She took the bag with both hands.
Collin stepped toward us.
“Nobody said she would.”
“I was talking to Jenna.”
“And I’m standing right here.”
“I can see you.”
He gave a laugh that didn’t get very far.
“So now we’re doing the big emotional goodbye.”
I kept my eyes on my daughter.
“Do you want to go?”
She looked toward the kitchen.
“I don’t know.”
“Then take a minute.”
“We’ve been here nearly an hour,” Collin said.
Jenna wiped her cheek.
“A minute isn’t an hour.”
“No, but this is going nowhere.”
She shifted the bag to one shoulder.
I stepped away from the front door. It cost me.
Every part of me wanted to stand there until she chose the right thing.
Instead, I went to the dining room and pulled out her chair.
“You can sit down with your coat on,” I said.
“I’ve done it plenty of times.”
She gave a wet little laugh.
Collin stayed in the hall.
Jenna sat.
I went into the kitchen and took the cover off the cake.
My hands shook enough that the rim hit the plate.
“Do you want some?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Small or big?”
She looked at the cake.
“Big.”
I cut the piece she asked for.
Collin came back as I set it in front of her.
“We can get dessert on the way.”
“I want this.”
“Fine. Have your cake.”
He stood beside his chair.
Jenna picked up her fork, then put it down.
I stayed on the other side of the table.
“Would you like a piece, Collin?”
He stared at me.
“You just told her to come back here after she marries somebody you can’t stand, and now you’re offering me cake?”
“Yes.”
Jenna put her hand against her mouth.
For one second I thought she was going to cry again.
Then she said, “That is pretty much Mom.”
I sat down.
No cashier was coming to testify. No recording would play.
I’d given him an apology to reject or accept, a meal to eat, and a door he could walk through.
My daughter had asked for one minute.
He pulled out his chair.
“You understand what she’s doing, don’t you?”
Jenna left her fork on the plate.
“Let me finish,” she said.
Three people at the table
Collin didn’t sit.
“Finish what? She has made up her mind. You heard her.”
Jenna held up one hand.
“I want to say something.”
“Then say it.”
She looked at me.
I lowered my eyes to the cake crumbs on the cloth.
I could help her by shutting my mouth.
It was a skill I’d never practiced recreationally.
“At the store,” she said, “when you called me, I told you not to talk about her like that.”
“I was joking with my fiancée.”
“I said stop.”
“And I stopped.”
“You laughed.”
“Because I thought you were being dramatic.”
She rubbed her thumb against the side of her fork.
I wanted to reach across the table.
I kept both hands in my lap.
Collin sat down.
“Listen. I didn’t recognize her. Obviously. If I had, none of this would’ve happened.”
Jenna looked up.
“That’s what she asked you.”
He pressed his lips together.
“Oh, so now we’re back to that.”
“What would you have done differently?”
“Introduced myself. Made conversation. Been less impatient. Is that what you need me to say?”
“Why couldn’t you be less impatient anyway?”
He turned toward me.
“Happy?”
I said nothing.
“She’s sitting there enjoying this,” he said to Jenna. “Look at her.”
I wasn’t enjoying it.
My daughter couldn’t pick up her fork because her hand wouldn’t stop shaking.
There wasn’t a victory in that room I wanted to hang on the wall.
But he needed me to answer.
I didn’t.
Jenna pushed her plate an inch away.
“Don’t talk to her. I’m asking you.”
“Fine. I was rude. I had a bad afternoon. I’m sorry. I said it.”
“You said she upset herself.”
“I said I was sorry she was upset.”
“That’s what I mean.”
He pushed back from the table.
“Then tell me the sentence. Write it down, and I’ll read it.”
Jenna looked at him for a long time.
There was the man from lane four.
He’d just taken longer to reach the register.
“I don’t want to give you a sentence,” she said.
“What do you want?”
She opened her mouth.
He went on.
“I bought a ninety-dollar bottle of wine. I came here on time. I helped with dinner. I apologized for a checkout line. How much more of tonight is supposed to be about your mother’s feelings?”
Jenna put both palms on the table.
“Mine,” she said.
He stopped.
“I was going to tell you about mine.”
“All right. Tell me.”
She looked at the doorway, then back at him.
“When I ask for a minute, I want the minute.”
“You got it.”
“You’re talking.”
He folded his arms.
“There. Go.”
She took a breath through her nose. I knew that breath.
She used it before jumping into a pool when she was small, furious with herself for being afraid.
“I didn’t want you to book the restaurant yet.”
His arms came apart.
“That’s what this is about now?”
“I wanted you to meet Mom.”
“You loved the restaurant.”
“I liked it. I said I wanted to look at one more.”
“The room would’ve gone.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I wasn’t going to risk it.”
She pulled her sleeves down over her hands.
“I did want to look.”
He turned to me.
“This is what I mean. An hour ago we were getting married. Now she’s questioning the whole wedding.”
I could’ve said he’d had the full hour to help himself.
I stayed quiet.
He leaned toward Jenna.
“Do you want to marry me?”
“Let me finish.”
“It’s a simple question.”
She closed her eyes, then opened them.
“No, it isn’t.”
He pushed his chair back so hard it struck the wall.
“Fine. Keep talking to your mother. She knows exactly how a husband should behave. Hers never gets to disappoint her anymore.”
Jenna stood.
“Don’t.”
He lifted his hands.
“I’m not insulting your dad.”
“Don’t say another thing about him.”
“Then stop comparing me to him.”
“I didn’t.”
“She did.”
I looked at him.
“I told you his name.”
He pointed toward the kitchen.
“You made his cake. You sat me in his chair. You spent the whole night looking at me like I was taking something.”
Jenna’s tears fell onto her coat.
“I put your plate there.”
He lowered his hand.
“Jenna.”
“I did that. Mom said it was okay.”
He came around the table. She stepped back.
“Don’t,” she said again.
He stopped close enough to touch her.
“Babe, let’s go home. Please. We can talk where we don’t have an audience.”
She looked at me.
I stood and picked up my untouched plate.
“I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Collin looked almost relieved.
I made it to the doorway before Jenna said, “Stay.”
I put the plate down.
She took off her coat and laid it over her chair.
Collin stared at it.
“You are seriously staying here.”
“Tonight, yes.”
“Over this.”
“Yes.”
He looked toward the front door, then at the wine.
“Do you know what you’re throwing away?”
She wiped her cheeks with both hands. There was nothing tidy about it.
Her nose was running.
She was trying to speak without making the sound that would turn speaking into sobbing.
He waited three seconds.
“Jenna.”
“Stop saying my name.”
“I’m trying to get through to you.”
“I hear you.”
“Then act like it.”
Her hand went to her ring.
He reached toward it.
“Don’t do that.”
She pulled her hand against her chest.
“You asked if I wanted to marry you.”
“Not with your mother sitting there.”
“She’s standing.”
It was such a small correction. So much like her father.
I pressed my lips together because crying then would’ve made it harder for her.
Jenna worked the ring over her knuckle.
Collin said, “If you take that off, don’t expect me to spend the weekend begging.”
She set it beside the corkscrew.
“I don’t want you to.”
He looked at the ring without touching it.
“There’s twelve hundred dollars on that restaurant.”
“I know.”
“And you think we can just cancel?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother can pay for that.”
“No,” Jenna said.
He looked at me then.
His face asked the question he hadn’t managed to turn into a joke.
I shook my head.
Jenna pushed the ring toward his place.
“Take it with you.”
The piece she asked for
Collin took the ring.
He put it in his pocket, missed the opening the first time, and swore at the cloth.
Neither of us helped.
At the doorway he turned.
“This is a mistake.”
Jenna stood beside her chair.
“Please leave.”
He waited for me to soften it.
I had softened enough things that evening to qualify as an appliance.
I opened the door.
He walked past me without saying goodbye.
I shut it and put my palm against the wood.
I wanted to slide down onto the floor. My knees were willing.
The rest of me still had a daughter in the dining room.
Jenna was sitting again when I went back.
She picked up her fork.
Then she put it down and cried.
I went to her.
She held on around my waist with both arms, the way she used to when she was smaller than the kitchen counter.
“I’m sorry,” she said into my shirt.
“Oh, honey.”
“I shut the door on you.”
“I know.”
“I thought if you would just stop talking, it would all be okay.”
I put my cheek against her hair.
“I thought something similar.”
She laughed and cried at the same time. I rubbed her back.
There was no useful speech.
Everything worth saying would’ve sounded like a speech, and she’d heard enough people explaining her evening.
After a while, she pulled away.
“Did you really mean it?”
“What?”
“That I could come back. If I married him.”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t have liked it.”
“No.”
She wiped her face with the napkin.
“I thought you’d say I made my choice.”
I sat beside her.
“I wish you’d told me.”
“I didn’t want you to think badly of him.”
I wanted to ask how long she’d been choosing her words that carefully.
I wanted names for every hurt she’d swallowed.
But her cake was still waiting, and she’d asked for it herself.
“Eat a bite,” I said.
She did.
Then she started crying again.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “It isn’t that bad.”
She put a hand over her mouth and laughed.
“It tastes like Dad’s.”
“It’s shorter.”
“He used to cut me the biggest piece.”
“So did I.”
She leaned against me, still holding the fork.
Later, she went out to her car and brought in the overnight bag.
I held the door while she carried it upstairs.
When she came down, she had changed out of the clothes she’d chosen for him.
She stopped at the table.
“There’s still half a roast.”
“Unfortunately, your mother shops like she’s feeding the county.”
She smiled. A tired smile, but nobody had checked it first.
The wine stood unopened beside Collin’s plate.
Jenna picked it up and put it in the hall.
“He can collect that with his things.”
The bottle he took back
He came on Saturday.
Jenna asked him to come while I was there.
She still had her own apartment, and we’d spent the morning collecting what belonged to him.
One coat, a charger, the clothes he’d left in a drawer.
Everything fit in a bag.
He’d sent messages about the restaurant before he sent one asking whether she was all right.
She showed me because she wanted help writing one answer, not because I asked to inspect them.
They’d paid separately. The deposit was his.
Jenna hadn’t agreed to book yet, and the confirmation he’d sent her said no refunds.
She wrote that she wouldn’t reimburse him.
Then she put down the phone and cried for a while.
On Saturday, he stood outside my door with his hands in his pockets.
“Can I come in?”
“No,” Jenna said.
“I’d like five minutes.”
She stood beside the bag.
“You can talk here.”
He looked past her at me.
“Alone.”
“I asked Mom to stay.”
He pressed his tongue against his cheek.
I remembered that tongue clicking behind my cart.
He’d seemed to have all the time in the world when he was using somebody else’s.
“I spoke to the restaurant,” he said. “They kept the deposit.”
“I know.”
“Twelve hundred dollars.”
She nodded.
“You could at least split it.”
“I asked you to wait before booking.”
“I was trying to do something for us.”
She didn’t answer.
He took one hand out of his pocket and held it toward her.
“Keep the ring, then. Sell it. Put that toward it.”
“You have the ring.”
He put his hand away.
“I know that.”
Jenna lifted the bag by its handles and set it outside the door.
He looked down at it.
“So that’s everything.”
“Everything of yours at my place.”
“And the money your mother promised?”
I answered that one.
“Stayed in my account.”
He looked at me for a moment, then bent to pick up the bag.
Jenna reached behind the door for the wine.
“This, too.”
He took it by the neck.
“I can’t return it.”
Neither of us asked why.
“Ninety dollars,” he said.
“$89.99,” I said.
Jenna stepped back inside.
He stood on my mat with the bag in one hand and the bottle in the other.
The ring went back with him. His things went back with him.
The restaurant kept his $1,200.00. My $3,000.00 stayed where I’d put it.
He raised the bottle a little.
“So I bought this for nothing.”
I held the door.
“You bought it for yourself.”
If this one got to you, send it to someone who needs to hear that coming home is still allowed.
Family dinners can turn tense fast, especially when old loyalties and new relationships collide – see the husband who was told to apologize to his mother and the wife whose husband brought her house deed to his mother. For another story of a daughter and family papers at the table, read “My Daughter Put My House Papers Beside Her Plate”.
