The coffee can Ricky keeps his buttons in still says Folgers on the side, and the lid has Dad’s handwriting on masking tape: RICKY’S. Nobody touches that can. On Thursday afternoon I watched my brother’s hand freeze over it, and I should have known right then the week had gone bad in a way I couldn’t see.
My mother had been in my house in Fargo since Monday. Three mornings at my table, and three mornings Ricky’s toast went cold on his plate. She moved Gage’s bouncer across the room. She told me Ricky shouldn’t be near the bottles. She took my baby out of my arms when my twenty-seven-year-old brother stood up to get a glass of water.
At quarter to two I asked her to watch Gage so I could shower. She had pills to pick up. I said Ricky could just sit near him. She looked straight past me at him and said, “He can’t even say your name, so don’t you dare leave him with that baby.”
He heard it. Everybody in our family knows those earmuffs don’t keep anything out. He put a green button in the blue corner, and she drove off at ten to two.
I got Gage down by five after. Eight minutes into my shower he screamed the scream that climbs, and then he stopped, and the quiet was the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
I ran out dripping in a towel. Ricky was in my gray armchair with Gage asleep on his chest, three pats and a rub, my rhythm, Vicki across his knees, his earmuffs down around his neck so he could hear. I sat on the floor at his feet.
He looked at the cookie sheet and said his first sentence in eight years. “Mom told me if I touch him, I go away.”
Out in the driveway, a car door shut.
The folder under the cereal
I did not get up.
That’s the first thing I want on the record, because every bone in my body that was raised by Stella said stand up, fix your face, put on clothes, smooth it over before she sees. I’ve been smoothing things over for her since I was nine. I’m good at it. I could smooth over a car wreck.
I stayed on the carpet in my towel with shampoo drying in my ear like cake frosting.
“Ricky,” I said. “Where’s away?”
His hand kept going on Gage’s back. Pat, pat, pat. Rub. Then he stood up.
He stood up slow, the way you get out of a canoe, with one arm still under my son and the other flat on his back, and Vicki slid off his knees and hit the floor with the noise of a dropped bag of flour. He didn’t hand me the baby. He walked past me down the hall carrying him, into the guest room where my mother had been sleeping, and I followed him in a towel like the world’s dampest bodyguard.
Her suitcase was open on the bed. Her robe. Her slippers lined up heel to heel because God forbid a slipper be crooked.
Ricky crouched, still holding Gage, and pulled a blue folder out of the zip pocket on the lid of the suitcase. He set it on the bedspread. He opened it with one finger.
Then he looked at the wall.
The first page was a photo of a brick building with a flagpole and a lake behind it. Big green letters across the top. A residential home in Duluth. Under the photo, somebody had paper-clipped a receipt.
Deposit, $1,500. Paid by card. October 30th.
Move-in date: December 1.
Resident: Ricky. His whole name, middle name too, the one only Dad ever used when Ricky put his shoes on the wrong feet.
Under that was the intake packet, filled out in my mother’s handwriting, all those slanted capital letters she used on our school lunch bags. Communication: nonverbal. Behavior around infants: unpredictable. Family able to provide care: NO.
Family able to provide care. No. In ink. While he was living in my living room eating my groceries and sorting buttons where my son could watch.
And at the bottom, signed by the guardian. Stella.
I’d like to tell you I said something brave. I said, “Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” to a brochure.
Ricky made a small sound in his throat. Gage stirred and Ricky’s hand went to work again, pat, pat, pat, rub, and the baby settled.
“She showed you this,” I said.
He nodded once. Same nod as five months ago in her kitchen when we asked if he wanted to come home with us.
“When?”
He didn’t have a word for when. He held up his free hand and folded the fingers down, one at a time, all the way. Then the other way, back up. Then again.
Fourteen days. She’d showed it to him the day she paid for it. He’d been carrying a lake in Duluth around in his head for two weeks, sitting four feet from my son, sorting reds and blues, and I’d been asking if he wanted mustard on his sandwich.
The front door opened.
“Leora? Why is the bathroom door open? There’s water all over the hall.”
Her heels on my tile. The pharmacy bag crackling.
I picked up the folder. Ricky looked at it in my hand, then at the doorway, then at the floor, and he took one step back so his shoulders were against the closet door. He did not let go of Gage. I’ll never forget that. He backed into a closet and kept my baby.
My mother came around the corner and saw the three of us. Her son with my son on his chest. Her daughter in a towel. Her folder.
“Give him to me,” she said. “Right now. Give me that baby.”
Two-fifteen to six
She came at Ricky with her arms out.
I stepped in front of him. Not gracefully. I was holding a towel closed with one hand and her folder in the other and my hair was dripping on her slippers.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Leora, he could drop him.”
“He hasn’t dropped him.”
“You don’t know that. You were in the shower. You don’t know what happened in this house for the last ten minutes, and neither do I, and that’s exactly my point.” She was breathing hard. My mother has never once in her life run, but she was breathing like she had. “Ricky. Ricky, look at me. Put the baby on the bed.”
Ricky looked at the carpet.
His hand kept going on Gage’s back. Pat, pat, pat. Rub.
“What happened,” I said, “is Gage woke up screaming and Ricky got him back to sleep in under a minute, which I have never done in my life, and he did it in my chair the way I do it, and Vicki was on his lap. That’s what happened.”
“The cat’s always on somebody.”
“The cat bit Marc on our wedding day.”
She looked at the folder then. I watched her see it. Her face did the thing a casserole does when you pull back the foil and it’s not done yet.
“You went in my suitcase.”
“He did,” I said. “He knew right where it was. Because you showed it to him. On the thirtieth.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“It says Duluth. It says December first. It says fifteen hundred dollars. It says family able to provide care, no. Which family, Mom? I’m the family. I’m standing right here. In a towel.”
She set the pharmacy bag on the dresser very carefully, the way she used to set things down at Dad’s funeral, and I knew she was about to get calm, and calm Stella is worse than yelling Stella.
“I was going to tell you this weekend,” she said. “With Marc here. Like adults. You are thirty-one years old with a seven-month-old baby and you are exhausted, honey, I can see it, you look terrible, you haven’t slept since August. You cannot do this. Nobody could do this. I did it for twenty-seven years and I couldn’t do it. That place is lovely. They have a lake. They have a music room. He’d be with people like him.”
“People like him.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” I held the folder up between us. “And you told him if he touched my son, he’d go there.”
“I told him to be careful.”
Behind me, Ricky said, “Go away.”
Both of us turned around.
He was still against the closet. His eyes were on the bedspread. His hand had stopped moving on Gage’s back, just flat now, like he was holding him down against wind. He said it again, louder, in his flat voice that never goes up at the end. “Touch him. Go away.”
That was her sentence. He was giving it back to her in pieces because it was too heavy to carry in one.
My mother’s mouth opened and nothing came out.
And here is the part I’m not proud of. I thought she’d break. I thought, okay, now she hears it in his voice, now she cries, now she says oh baby, no, I didn’t mean it like that, and we all go sit on the couch and have a terrible little talk and nobody goes to Duluth.
She didn’t break.
She picked up her phone off the dresser and said, “I’m calling Marc.”
“He’s on the line. He can’t answer on the line.”
“Then I’ll call the plant.” She was already scrolling. “He has a right to know his son’s been left alone with somebody who can’t call 911. What if he’d had a seizure, Leora? What if the baby choked? Would Ricky call anybody? Would he come get you? He didn’t even come get you. He sat in a chair.”
“He fixed it.”
“This time.”
She got the plant. I heard the switchboard woman. My mother said she was Marc’s mother-in-law and it was a family emergency involving the baby, and I swear to God I watched her decide to use those words.
At 2:40 my husband walked out of a bottling plant in the middle of his shift, still in his hairnet, because he thought his kid was in the hospital.
He called me from the truck. I had clothes on by then. Barely. Sweatpants and Marc’s hockey shirt and a towel still around my head.
“Is Gage okay? Leora, is he okay? Your mom said—”
“He’s asleep. He’s fine.”
“Then why the hell did she say emergency?”
I looked across the living room. Ricky was back in my gray chair, Gage still on his chest, because he would not put him down. Not for me, not for her. Every time my mother came within six feet, Ricky turned his whole body toward the window, baby and all, like a man protecting a candle. Vicki was back on his knees. My mother was in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and her purse still on her shoulder like she was a customer waiting for her number.
“Come home,” I said. “And don’t take her side until you’ve seen the folder.”
There was a long pause on the line. Marc’s a quiet man. He thinks with his whole face and you can’t see it on the phone.
“She told me about Duluth,” he said.
The kitchen floor went soft under my feet.
“When?”
“Couple weeks ago. At the gas station. She said she was looking into it. Said it was just in case. Said you were drowning and you’d never ask for help and somebody had to.” Another pause. “I said she should talk to you.”
“Did you say no?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Marc. Did you say no?”
“I said she should talk to you. Leora, I’m driving. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.”
He hung up.
I stood there holding my phone. Across the room my mother uncrossed her arms, and for the first time all week she looked like she was enjoying herself.
“He agrees with me,” she said. “He just won’t say it to your face. Nobody will. Except me.”
The cookie sheet
Marc got home at 3:05.
He came in the door with the hairnet still on, and he didn’t take it off for the next hour, and that is how I’m going to remember the worst afternoon of my marriage: a big quiet man in a paper hairnet standing in my living room trying to look like the judge.
My mother went right at him. Before he had his boots off. She had the folder open on the kitchen table and she was flipping pages for him like a realtor. The lake. The music room. The deposit. She said “respite” four times. She said “professionals.” She said, “Frederick would’ve wanted him safe,” and I had to put my hand flat on the counter.
“Dad made me promise,” I said. “Week before he died. In the hospital. He made me promise Ricky would never be put somewhere.”
“Your father was on morphine.”
“He was on morphine when he said he loved you, too. Should we throw that one out?”
Marc said, “Okay. Okay. Everybody.”
Nobody was okay.
And Ricky sat in the gray chair through all of it with Gage on his chest. Gage had woken up by then. He was chewing his fist and staring up at Ricky’s chin like it was the moon. Every time my mother’s voice went up, Ricky’s hand went pat, pat, pat, rub, and Gage’s eyes went heavy again.
Marc kept looking at them. I watched him look.
“He’s been holding him an hour?” Marc said.
“Hour and ten,” I said.
“He won’t let go of him,” my mother said. “That’s not normal, Marc. That’s not safe. You see that, don’t you? He’s fixated. That’s what happens. They fixate. He did it with the vacuum cleaner for two years. He did it with the smoke alarm.”
“He said a sentence,” I said.
My mother laughed. Not a real one. The one she does at church when the pastor makes a joke she doesn’t get.
“He said turn it off, eight years ago, and your father dined out on it till he died.”
“He said one today.”
Marc turned. “What?”
“Tell him what Ricky said, Mom. You were standing right there when he said the pieces of it.”
She closed the folder.
“He repeats things,” she said. “He’s always repeated things. It doesn’t mean he understands them.”
Marc pulled off the hairnet then. He stood there holding it like he didn’t know where it came from.
“Stella,” he said. “What did he say?”
“Something I said to him. To keep the baby safe. That’s all. I was being careful. Somebody in this house has to be.”
There it was. Her line from the kitchen, word for word, same tune. Somebody in this house has to be. She’d been saying it so long she couldn’t hear it anymore.
And I want to tell you that’s when Marc saw it and came over to my side and we stood together like a poster.
That’s not what happened.
What happened is Marc rubbed his face and said, “Lee. Maybe we just look at the place.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Just look. For a weekend. It’s not forever. She’s right that you’re tired. I’m on first shift, you’re alone all day, the baby’s not sleeping, your brother’s—” He waved his hand at the chair. “You haven’t been out of this house without a car seat since June. Maybe we go see it in person and—”
“And what? Drop him off for the weekend at a place he’s been told is where you go when you’re bad?”
“That’s not—”
“That’s exactly what she told him, Marc. Touch him and you go away. That’s the brochure. That’s the lake. That’s the music room.”
My mother said, “I am not going to stand here and be called a monster in front of my own son.”
“Then sit down,” I said.
She did not sit down. She went to the end of the couch, to the cookie sheet, and she picked it up.
Two hundred buttons, maybe more. Reds in one corner, blues in another, browns in a line down the middle, every one where Ricky put it. My mother picked up five months of my brother’s afternoons in both hands and said, “This is what I’m talking about. This is his whole life. Buttons. He can’t hold a job, he can’t hold a conversation, and you want to hand him a baby—”
The sheet tipped.
I don’t know if she meant it to. I’ve decided I’ll never know, and I’ve decided it doesn’t matter.
Buttons went everywhere. Across the carpet, under the couch, into the heat register, a sound like hail on a car. A red one rolled clear to my feet.
Gage jumped and wailed.
And Ricky stood up with my son in his arms, and he made a sound I had not heard come out of him since he was eleven years old and the neighbor’s dog got hit. Not a word. A noise from the bottom of a well.
My mother stepped back.
Marc stepped forward.
And Ricky, my brother who has not looked a person in the eye on purpose in maybe a decade, turned around and held Gage out to me. Arms straight. Face white. Done.
Like he was turning himself in.
Eighteen days
I took my son.
I’ll tell you what that felt like. It felt like being handed the thing you’ve been fighting to protect and realizing you were holding the wrong end of it the whole time.
Gage screamed into my neck. Ricky put his hands over his ears and turned to the window. The earmuffs were still around his neck. He didn’t pull them up. He just pressed his palms flat over his ears and stood there with his back to all of us, and his shoulders were going.
Nobody spoke for what felt like a minute.
Then I walked across the buttons in my bare feet, and they hurt, and I stood next to my brother at the window, and I did the thing.
Three pats. One slow rub. On Gage’s back.
He kept screaming.
Again. Three pats. Rub.
Still screaming.
“Ricky,” I said. “I can’t do it. You do it better.”
He didn’t move.
“You do it better than me. He likes yours. Please.”
His hands came down off his ears, slow. He looked at Gage. Not at me, at Gage. And I held my son out, and my brother took him back, and put him on his chest, and pat, pat, pat, rub.
Gage hiccuped twice and went quiet.
I turned around.
Marc was staring at them with the hairnet balled in his fist. My mother was standing in a ring of buttons with the empty cookie sheet hanging off two fingers.
“He gave him back,” my mother said. “You saw that. He gave him back. He knows he can’t—”
“He gave him back because you told him he’d be sent away if he kept him,” I said. “And then you dumped his buttons on the floor. And he still gave him to me first. He was thinking about the baby. Who were you thinking about?”
Marc said, “Stella.”
That was all. Just her name. But he said it in the voice he uses on the phone with the bank.
She turned to him. “Marc—”
“You called my work and said there was an emergency with my son.”
“There was.”
“There was a man holding my son asleep in a chair.” He picked up the folder off the kitchen table. He didn’t open it. He just held it. “You told me two weeks ago you were looking into this place. You didn’t say you’d paid. You didn’t say you’d shown it to him. You didn’t say what you told him.”
“I didn’t think I had to clear it with my son-in-law.”
“I’m the one he lives with.”
She looked at me then. And I saw her decide, the way I’d watched her decide on the phone with the plant, which words to use.
“Leora. Honey. You’re tired. When you’re rested you’ll see I was right. December first. That’s eighteen days. You just have to get through eighteen days and then you’ll get your life back.”
My life. I looked around the room. My son on my brother’s chest. My cat on the carpet with a blue button stuck in her fur. My husband in his work boots. Buttons everywhere.
“This is my life,” I said. “You’re standing in it.”
I went to the kitchen. I got my phone. I put it on speaker and set it on the counter so everybody could hear, and I dialed the number on the bottom of the receipt, and while it rang I said, “Mom, you’re going to tell them. Not me. You.”
“I will not.”
“Then I will, and I’ll tell them what you wrote about him. Behavior around infants: unpredictable. While he was holding one for an hour and ten minutes. You want me to read that to a stranger?”
A woman answered. Intake office, Duluth.
My mother stood there. The woman said hello twice.
And my mother put the cookie sheet down on the counter, and picked up my phone, and said in a voice I’d never heard from her, small and scraped thin, “This is Stella. I need to cancel a placement. December first.”
The woman asked for the resident’s name. My mother said Ricky’s whole name, middle name too.
The woman said the deposit was non-refundable inside thirty days.
My mother said, “I know.”
Fifteen hundred dollars. Gone to a lake my brother will never see. She’d paid it to make him go away, and now she’d paid it to make it stop, and it was the same money either way.
She hung up. She didn’t look at any of us.
“I’ll go pack,” she said.
Nobody said she didn’t have to.
Green in the green corner
She was ready by five.
Marc carried her suitcase out to her car. Not because he’s a gentleman, though he is. Because he wanted to make sure it went.
I stood in the doorway of the living room with Gage on my hip. Ricky was on his knees on the carpet, picking up buttons, one at a time, with two fingers. Not sorting yet. Just collecting. Into the Folgers can with Dad’s tape on the lid.
My mother came down the hall in her coat with her purse and the pharmacy bag. She stopped at the edge of the living room. She looked at her son on the floor.
I thought she’d walk past. That’s what she does. She walks past.
She didn’t.
She went down. My mother is sixty-three years old and has a bad hip and wears good slacks, and she got down on her knees on my carpet in her coat, and picked up a brown button, and held it out to him.
He didn’t take it.
She set it down on the carpet in front of his knee.
“I was scared, Ricky,” she said. “That’s all it ever was. I was scared of you since you were three, and I was scared of me, and I told you something terrible because I wanted the scared to stop. That’s on me. Not you. You’re not going anywhere. You hear me? You’re not going to Duluth. You’re not going anywhere you don’t want.”
His hand hovered over the brown button. Then he picked it up and put it in the can.
That was all she got. She didn’t get a look, she didn’t get a nod. She got her button put away.
She got up. It took her two tries and the arm of the couch. She looked at me.
“Christmas,” she said.
“Not this one,” I said.
She opened her mouth.
“Not this one, Mom. Maybe Easter. If he wants you there.”
She nodded. And she walked out, and Marc came back in alone, and her car backed out of the driveway at 5:12, and the heater kicked on in the living room like the house was letting its breath out.
Marc stood in the hallway in his socks for a long time looking at Ricky picking up buttons.
Then he got down on the floor too. Big knees cracking. And he reached under the couch and started handing them over.
“Sorry, bud,” he said. “I should’ve said no at the gas station.”
Ricky put a red one in the can.
Marc handed him another.
It took the three of us till after eight to find them all. I found one inside Gage’s sock, which I still can’t explain. Vicki found four and batted them under the fridge and we had to use the yardstick. Marc fished two out of the heat register with tweezers. We ate frozen pizza on the floor because nobody wanted to get up. Gage sat in my lap and threw a pizza crust at Ricky and Ricky caught it, which made Marc laugh so hard he choked.
At 8:40 the can was full. Ricky carried the cookie sheet back to the end of the couch and set it down level. He sat. He started sorting.
Reds in one corner. Blues in another. Browns in a line down the middle.
Gage was getting fussy, so I took him to the gray chair and sat down and did it, three pats and a rub, and he wasn’t having it. He was over me. He arched and wailed and looked across the room.
At his uncle.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I get it.”
I got up. I walked over. I held my son out, and Ricky put down the button he was holding and took him, easy as anything, and put him on his chest.
Pat. Pat. Pat. Rub.
Gage was out in under a minute.
I sat down on the floor at Ricky’s feet. I leaned my back against the couch. My hair had dried weird from the shampoo and it stuck out on one side like a cockatoo. Marc was asleep in the armchair with his mouth open.
Ricky reached over with his free hand, still holding Gage with the other, and picked a green button out of the blue corner. The one from that afternoon. He turned it over once in his fingers.
He put it in the green corner, where it goes.
Then he looked at me. At me. Right in the face, for maybe two seconds, which in Ricky is a year.
“Leora,” he said.
Family tension over unfair rules shows up in the story of a stepmom raising rent for one child while another paid nothing and a brother mocking his sibling in front of the whole family. For another difficult clash with a mother, see the power of attorney she never signed.
