My husband called our five-year-old a liar in front of his whole family at his parents’ anniversary lunch, right after she put her finger on his oldest friend’s coat and said Daddy cries in it. “She makes stuff up, Lyn,” he said. Then she told them about the building with the fish tank, and his friend reached into that coat.
I had been married to Devon for eleven years, and I’d have bet our house he had never lied to me once.
It was his parents’ fortieth, out on the covered porch at their place on Table Rock Lake.
Grant had hung his brown canvas coat on the back of his chair when the sun finally came out.
Josie dropped her sidewalk chalk, walked straight across the flagstones and put one finger on the sleeve.
“That’s Daddy’s crying coat,” she said.
The whole porch laughed.
So did I.
That same week she’d told the lady at the pharmacy drive-thru that our ceiling fan gets scared at night, so I figured this was more of that.
Then I caught Devon’s face.
He was at the grill end of the table holding a tray of corn, and his face had gone the color of the paper plates.
He was staring at Grant.
Grant pulled the coat off his chair and folded it over his arm.
“Bug, what’s that mean?” I said.
Josie scowled at all of us for laughing.
“Daddy wears it in the cold room. And he cries all over Granty.”
Nobody laughed that time.
Down the yard the little cousins were still shrieking through the sprinkler, and somebody’s phone kept playing the same song, but our end of the porch went flat.
Devon set the corn down.
“She makes stuff up, Lyn,” he said.
He said it way too fast.
Josie spun around at him with her hands on her hips.
“I do NOT. The building with the big fish tank.”
Grant got up so fast his chair went over backward on the stone.
“Who’s ready for cake?” he said, too loud, to nobody.
I knew right then.
Devon is thirty-seven. He’s the kind who fixes a thing before he tells you it broke.
When the water heater went in March, he had a new one in before I woke up.
When the plant cut second shift, he’d already lined up a job at the feed mill before I heard one word about it.
Sparing me, he’d say.
To me it was love.
It never crossed my mind that sparing me and lying to me could be the same job.
Grant has been his best friend since T-ball. He stood up at our wedding.
He drove me to the hospital the night Josie came, because Devon was stuck on a double. Our back door key hangs on his ring.
And on EVERY Sunday, the two of them had Josie out of the house by eight.
Donuts, the splash pad, the lizards at the pet store, the free day at the science center.
That was two and a half hours a week where nobody needed me. I’d sit on the back steps with my coffee and not hear one cartoon.
I never asked a single question about it.
Now I got down in front of Josie.
“Which fish tank, bug?”
Devon came around the table.
“Lyn. Not here.”
I put my hand up without looking at him.
“Josie, have you been in there with Daddy and Granty?”
Her chin went up and down.
“A lady lets me have goldfish crackers and a sticker, and Daddy goes in the big tube to get his pictures.”
Something in my gut went cold.
“What kind of pictures?”
She knocked two knuckles on her own head, right above the ear.
Somebody turned the music off.
Vicki put her hand over her mouth.
Grant’s girlfriend Kacie set her plate down on the cake table and didn’t pick it back up.
My brother Todd kept looking from Devon to Grant like either man was about to laugh and say she had it wrong.
Neither one did.
And the last ten weeks started lining up in my head.
Devon at his own parents’ gate, punching in the code he’s had since high school, three times.
All those headaches, pinned on his new glasses.
The night his left hand quit on him and a full jar of pickles hit the kitchen floor.
The orange pill bottle in his shaving kit with the label scratched off. He told me it was Grant’s.
So that was a lie too.
Josie pulled at my shirt.
“Mommy, is it me you’re mad at?”
I went all the way down on my knees on the flagstones.
“Not at you. Never at you. But you have to help me. When Daddy cries, what happens?”
She looked over at Devon first, like she needed his say-so.
He shut his eyes.
Watching him do it scared me worse than the tube.
“Granty’s coat was on the long bed chair,” she said. “Daddy got cold and his legs went floppy, so he slid down to the tiles in it.”
Grant pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes.
“And then?” I said.
“Granty hugged him. And Daddy kept saying he CAN’T GO AWAY from us.”
I couldn’t swallow.
Devon came closer and I backed off a step.
“Go away?”
He looked around at his parents, his aunts, at everybody standing there holding a paper plate.
“Lyn, I meant to tell you.”
“WHEN?”
He didn’t have anything.
Josie kept going, because for once no grownup was talking over her.
“And Mommy’s NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW till the new doctor takes the bad dot out.”
Vicki started crying.
My own hand was over my mouth and I didn’t remember putting it there.
“What bad dot?”
She touched the same place above her ear.
“The dot on Daddy’s pictures.”
Grant shoved a hand into the coat hanging over his arm and pulled out an envelope, folded in half.
Devon caught him by the forearm.
“Not today.”
Grant didn’t let go of it.
“Same thing you told me when the MRI came back. Same thing once the biopsy was done. Another month of Sundays, man? You keep STEALING them off her.”
Biopsy.
Nobody on that porch made a sound after that word.
I turned back to Devon.
That morning he’d braided Josie’s hair in the truck and said this summer we’d finally take her to see the ocean.
Then my eyes went to the envelope.
LYNDSEY, in Devon’s block letters, on the outside.
And under it a date. Five weeks old.
Grant let out a breath that shook.
“Lyn, that’s not all that’s in here. They found it when they ran his bloodwork. It’s about Josie.”
Devon let go of Grant’s arm.
And he stared at that envelope like the bad dot was the easy part.
The pink card
I took it out of Grant’s hand. He let me.
Three pages of yellow legal pad were folded around a printout from the genetics clinic, the one on the second floor of the building with the fish tank.
The printout had Devon’s name across the top and a box in the middle with the result in it. A change in a gene called NF2. He was born with it. The tumors grow on the nerves, it said, most often the hearing nerve, right above the ear.
Under that: Each child of an affected parent has a 50% chance of inheriting the variant. Genetic testing for the patient’s daughter is recommended now, before symptoms.
A pink appointment card was paper-clipped to the corner.
Josie Hahn. Lab draw. Sunday, June 7, 8:15 a.m.
Next Sunday. A donut Sunday.
Josie was pulling at my shirt again. I picked her up and put her on my hip, which she’s too big for, and held the card where Devon could see it.
He didn’t look at the card. He looked past me, at his mother.
Vicki came around the cake table with her hand out.
“Honey, give that back to him. We all agreed this wasn’t for today.”
The boat pictures
The first time Devon brought me to this house I was twenty-two and wearing the wrong shoes for a dock.
Vicki took my arm before I’d set my purse down and walked me down the hall one frame at a time. Devon in T-ball. Devon with no front teeth. Rodger and Vicki on this porch the year they bought the place.
And one of Rodger at maybe twenty, in a bass boat with a skinny kid holding up a fish.
“That’s Rodger’s little brother,” she said. “We lost him in this lake. Thirty-four years old.”
She said it like a thing she’d said a hundred times.
At supper Rodger sat at the end with everybody on his right. Devon told me later his dad had been deaf in the left ear since before he could remember. An outboard motor, back when he was young. That was the story.
After supper Vicki showed me the cedar chest at the foot of their bed. Tax returns back to 1986. Devon’s baby teeth in a pill bottle. Every card anybody ever mailed them.
“If it happened in this family, it’s in that chest,” she said, and locked it with a little brass key off her car ring.
I loved her for that. I grew up in a house where nobody kept anything.
When I was pregnant with Josie, Vicki drove ninety minutes to every appointment I’d let her come to. At the first one the nurse asked about history on the father’s side, and Vicki answered before Devon could open his mouth.
“Healthy as horses. All of us.”
The nurse typed it in.
Now that same hand was out flat in front of me on the porch, waiting.
Vicki’s kitchen
I didn’t give it to her. I carried Josie inside and sat her on the counter by the sink with a fistful of pretzels.
Vicki came in behind me. Devon came in behind her.
“How long have you known?” I said.
Vicki started wiping a counter that was already clean.
“He told us the week he found out. He wanted you to have one more good summer, Lyn. That’s all this was.”
“And her?” I tapped the pink card.
“There’s nothing to find in her.” She folded the dish towel in thirds. “Nobody in this family has ever had anything like this. The doctor said it can just start in a person, out of nowhere. It’s bad luck.”
Devon was leaning on the fridge like he needed it.
“That part’s true,” he said. “Half the time it starts new.”
I flattened the printout on the counter and read it again, slower, the way I read Josie’s school forms.
Down in the family history section: Per patient and patient’s mother (by phone): no known family history. Testing of patient’s parents offered. Declined.
“Who declined?” I said.
Vicki kept folding.
I got my phone out and called the number on the card. It was Saturday. A woman from an answering service took my name and said somebody would call back Monday.
“I’m her mother,” I said. “I want her draw moved to Monday, and I want to be in the room. Write that down.”
“Ma’am, I don’t show a draw for that patient.”
I looked at the card. I looked at Devon.
He rubbed his face with his good hand.
“I cancelled it Thursday,” he said. “Mom thought we should wait.”
Rodger’s left ear
That was the part I couldn’t get past. Not that he’d cancelled it. That he’d asked her first.
I left Josie with Todd and his phone and some game with a cartoon cow that moos when you tap it, and I went back out to the porch.
The cake was still on its table with forty candles in it nobody had lit. Grant had gone down the steps with Kacie. Most of the aunts had found reasons to be in the yard.
Rodger hadn’t moved. He was still at the table with a plate of corn going cold in front of him.
I took the chair on his left.
“Rodger, why’d you say no to the blood test?”
He kept looking at the lake.
So I got up and sat down again on his right and said it again.
“Vicki handles the doctors,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
He took off his Bass Pro cap to wipe his forehead, and out of forty years of habit he pushed the hair back off the left side with the same hand.
I’d never sat that close to him. Or he’d never let anybody sit on that side.
There was a scar behind his left ear, white and old and curved like a fishhook, running up into his hair.
Right where Josie had knocked her two knuckles.
The cedar chest
“An outboard did that?” I said.
He put his cap back on.
“That’s what we tell people.”
Vicki’s purse was on the bench inside the front door, where it’s sat every visit for eleven years. Her car keys were in the side pocket. The little brass one was still on the ring.
I didn’t ask anybody.
The chest was where it always was. The folders inside went by year, in her handwriting, and 1994 was fat.
Light bills. Devon’s kindergarten picture. And a letter on hospital letterhead from St. Louis, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Rodger Hahn.
It was about Rodger’s surgery. The tumor on his hearing nerve. His bloodwork. A hereditary condition, the letter said, the same one confirmed in his late brother.
Each of your children has a fifty percent chance of carrying this condition. We strongly recommend that your son Devon, age five, be tested, and that he begin MRI screening by age twelve. Tumors found early are small and far easier to treat.
Across the top, in blue pen, in Vicki’s hand: Not now.
Behind it in the folder were reminder postcards from the same hospital. 2001. 2003. 2006. Devon is due for his screening. Not one was filled out.
Somebody stopped in the bedroom doorway. Devon.
He came and took the letter out of my hand, and I let him, and he read it standing up and then dropped onto the end of his parents’ bed.
His eyes went back up the page and read it again.
“I was five,” he said.
Same as Josie. Same age she was right now, sitting on the counter in that kitchen eating pretzels.
He looked up at the doorway behind me.
Vicki was standing in it with her purse hanging open.
The cake table
“Put that back,” she said, and when I walked past her she followed me down the hall and out the screen door.
Everybody who’d been pretending to be in the yard drifted up the steps. Grant came with Kacie. Todd stood in the kitchen door with Josie behind his legs.
I set the letter on the cake table next to the forty candles.
“You went in my chest,” Vicki said. “You took my keys out of my purse like a thief.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He was a little boy.” She was talking to the aunts now, to Rodger, to anybody who’d look at her. “What was I supposed to do, put a five-year-old in a machine every year and tell him he’s sick? He wasn’t sick. He played ball. He went to prom. He married you. He got twenty-five years nobody ruined for him.”
“Mom,” Devon said.
“And Rodger’s brother never saw a doctor in his life, that’s what happened to him, it’s not the same thing—”
“It’s the same thing,” Rodger said.
Everybody turned. In eleven years I’d never heard him talk over her.
Vicki went red up her neck.
“That genetics woman called this house five weeks ago and asked me straight out,” she said. “And I told her no. Because it’s nobody’s business. If that baby gets tested and it comes back, it goes in her chart, and every doctor she ever sees reads about this family. About Rodger. About his brother. Is that what you want for her?”
Nobody answered, so she turned on me.
“If I’d told him, if he’d told you, would you have married him? Would you have had her?”
I looked at Devon. He was looking at the letter.
“I’d have had him scanned at twelve,” I said.
Then I took the pink card off the table, the one he’d cancelled, and put it in my back pocket.
“Monday. I’m taking her. I’ll be in the room.”
Devon got up. He went to Todd and took Josie by the hand, and she dug the chalk out of her pocket and gave it to him, the way she always does when they leave somewhere.
Grant came across the porch and pushed his brown coat into my arms.
“It’s cold in those rooms,” he said.
Vicki followed us to the top of the steps.
“Devon, it’s our fortieth. It’s your father’s cake.”
He stopped with Josie’s hand in his.
“Forty years, Mom. You could’ve told me in any of them.”
Sunday, eight-fifteen
The building with the big fish tank is colder inside than out, even in July.
Devon’s hair is growing back in a curved stripe over his right ear. He walks with a cane he hates, and he lets Grant drive.
Josie’s blood came back nine days after that lunch. She has it.
So now the Sundays are mine too. My coffee rides in the cup holder and goes cold while she does her hearing test, the first one, the one they’ll do every year from now on. The scans start when she’s eight. Anything that shows up will show up small.
Vicki has mailed her four cards since the lake. They’re in a shoebox on top of our fridge. Rodger drove up once by himself and sat on our back steps for an hour, and when he left he gave Josie a fishing lure with the hook cut off.
The lady at the desk still gives out goldfish crackers.
I had Grant’s coat on in the waiting room. Josie came over and put one finger on the sleeve.
“That’s Daddy’s crying coat.”
“It’s mine today, bug,” I said.
She thought about that, then climbed into my lap and pulled the sleeve around herself like a blanket.
The nurse opened the door and said her name, and I stood up with Josie still inside it.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody whose family keeps a box of papers nobody’s allowed to open.
Family tensions can get even messier when someone’s words are dismissed – see what happened in “My Son Said I Signed for $44,000 Against the House I Paid For” and “My Uncle Says Grandpa Can’t Remember Anything. I’m Supposed to Drive Him Somewhere Tuesday.”. And for another family clash over a child, read “My Sister Tore Up the $3,850 Repair Quote and Said I Hated Her Kid”.
