My sister’s husband parked one shoeless foot on the armrest an inch from my cheek, in the van I’d rented for $680 to take our mother to her seventieth, and when I asked him to take it down he laughed and said, “You paid for the van, Maryann. Not the air in it.” So I quit fighting him and waited for him to doze off.
Six hours into the drive, something warm touched my ear.
I thought it was Aoife’s hand.
But Aoife was asleep against the window, both hands tucked under her chin.
I turned my head.
Five toes. Yellow nails. Parked on the armrest of my seat like a footstool he’d paid for.
And the smell got to me.
Ruben had the whole back row to himself. His sneakers were kicked under my seat with his socks balled up inside them, and he had his earbuds in and a bag of sunflower seeds open on his chest.
“Ruben. Get it down.”
He tugged an earbud loose.
“I’m not even on you.”
“You were on my ear.”
“So lean the other way.”
“It’s MY armrest.”
“It’s a rental,” he said. “It’s everybody’s armrest.”
Stefanie was driving. She found me in the mirror for one second and then went back to the road.
I’d put $4,200 on my card for the lake house. Another $680 for the van, because Mom wanted all of us in one car like when we were little. Ruben had chipped in NOTHING but a red cooler of beer and the opinion that the house was a little much.
In went the earbud. His toes curled and uncurled an inch from my face.
I leaned toward the window.
Another forty minutes went by and the toes hadn’t gone anywhere.
Then we hit a pothole outside some town with a water tower painted like a hot air balloon, and his heel slid off the armrest and landed in my hair.
INTO MY HAIR.
I twisted all the way around in my seatbelt.
“Take your foot off my seat. Right now.”
He gave me a long, tired look, like I was the one wrecking the trip.
“Jesus, Maryann. It’s a foot. You’d think I stuck it in your coffee.”
Mom was in the seat beside me. She’d been quiet for three states.
“Ruben, honey, that’s nasty,” she said.
He laughed. “Both of you need a nap.”
Stefanie said, “Can we please not do this today?”
Today. Like there was a better day for it.
So I stopped.
“Fine,” I said.
He grinned at me with all his teeth, like he’d just won money off me, and stretched his other leg across the empty seat.
Half an hour after that he was snoring.
The foot never moved. It sat there on the armrest a hand’s width from my shoulder, toes spread, a sunflower shell stuck to the sole.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I looked at the pouch in Aoife’s lap.
She’d packed it herself for the lake. Her sparkly stuff. The things she’d been saving up for her grandma’s party, because she’s eleven and she thinks my mother hung the moon.
I touched her arm. She opened one eye.
“Can I borrow that, bug?”
“Why?”
I bent down close and told her.
Her eyes got huge. She jammed her fist against her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud.
Mom saw her face, then mine, then the pouch.
“Maryann Hanlon,” she said. “You are FORTY-THREE YEARS OLD.”
“Watch the mirror for me,” I said.
Mom turned and looked out her own window. Her shoulders were shaking.
It took me under two minutes. He didn’t twitch once.
Then I zipped the pouch, passed it back to Aoife, and put my own earbuds in.
We pulled up to the lake house at Table Rock a little after five.
The whole family was already out on the porch. Uncle Quentin with a beer. Cousins. Ellen, Ruben’s OWN mother, who’d flown in just for this. Somebody had hung a banner with Mom’s name on it in gold glitter.
Ruben slid the door open, yawned, and climbed out barefoot onto the gravel with his sneakers hanging from one hand.
He got maybe four steps.
My cousin Kara looked at his feet and choked on her drink.
Quentin set his bottle down on the railing very slowly.
Somebody’s phone came up.
Then another.
Ellen pressed her hand flat to her chest and said, “Oh, Ruben. Oh, honey.”
He stopped walking.
“What?”
Nobody said a word.
Kara was folded over the porch rail, shaking.
He followed their eyes down to the gravel.
His face went the color of his cooler, all the way to his ears.
Then he wheeled around and found me standing in the van door.
“Maryann, WHAT DID YOU DO to my feet?”
Bubblegum Riot
Ten toenails, painted hot pink, with glitter in the polish so thick it looked poured on.
A little rhinestone heart stuck to each big toe.
And across the top of his right foot, in Aoife’s gold glitter gel pen, in letters as big as I could fit between his ankle and his toes: HAPPY 70TH BERNICE.
That’s what the porch was looking at. Twenty-two relatives. I know the number because I made the bed list.
I didn’t answer him.
I climbed down onto the gravel, turned around and gave Mom my hand, the way I’d been planning to do it since March. She took it. She got one foot on the step and had to stop there, because she was laughing too hard to come down.
“Maryann, what is ON me?” Ruben said.
He lifted one foot and twisted it up to look, hopping on the other one with his sneakers swinging from his hand. The sun hit it. The glitter went off like a disco ball.
Kara made a sound I’ve only heard from her once before, at her own wedding, when the DJ played the wrong song for the first dance.
“Turn it this way,” somebody’s husband said from the steps. “I can’t read the last part.”
“It says Bernice,” Quentin said. “He’s wearing your name, Bernie.”
“I see that,” Mom said.
She was out of the van now and hanging onto my arm. I could feel her shaking through her cardigan.
Aoife came out behind her with the pouch hugged to her stomach. She was trying very hard to look like a kid who’d been asleep for three hours.
Ruben put the foot down and picked up the other one.
Same pink. Same heart.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my GOD. Is this permanent? Maryann. Is this permanent?”
I still didn’t say anything. I was busy getting Mom’s purse off the floor of the van.
The driver’s door slammed.
Stefanie came around the front of the van, past the grille, and stopped where the gravel met the grass. She looked at his feet for a long time.
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even get close.
Then she looked at me. The porch was so loud behind us I almost missed it.
“You have no idea what you just did,” she said.
The thread called MOM 70
I started the group text on the second of March.
Stefanie named it. MOM 70, all capitals, because that’s how she types when she’s excited, and back in March she was excited.
The idea was mine, though.
At Christmas Mom had said, more than once, that all she wanted for seventy was everybody in one place for a weekend. No restaurant. No cake with a sparkler in it. Everybody in one house, and everybody in one car to get there, like when we were little and Dad drove us up to Okoboji in the brown wagon.
That wagon had a cigarette burn on the back seat shaped like Florida. I don’t know why I still remember that.
So I found the house. Five bedrooms on Table Rock, a dock, a hot tub, a porch that wrapped around two sides of it. I put the deposit down that night and the rest in May.
Forty-two hundred dollars.
I didn’t ask anybody to split it. I told myself I didn’t want anybody to.
That’s not completely true. I wanted somebody to offer.
Stefanie sent eleven hearts. Kara sent a GIF of a woman crying into a cake. Quentin wrote, “Count me in, I’m bringing the horseshoes.”
Ruben wrote, “kinda a lot of house for one weekend lol.”
About an hour later he texted me by himself. Just me.
“hey send me the pics of that place? want to show my mom”
I thought that was sweet. I honestly did. Ellen and my mother have always gotten along, at the wedding, at every Thanksgiving, the year the oven quit and they cooked the turkey in pieces on the grill together.
So I sent him all of them.
The dock at sunset. The white kitchen. The hot tub. And the corner bedroom with the big window on the water, where I’d taken my finger and drawn a red circle around the bed and written MOM inside it in crooked letters. I’d done that sitting in my car in the parking lot at work, on my lunch, because I was so happy I’d found it.
Ruben never wrote anything else in the thread about the house. Not when I posted the bed list. Not when Stefanie asked who was bringing the good coffee. He came back in July to ask if the dock had a place to hook up a speaker, and when I said I didn’t know, he wrote, “guess we’ll find out lol,” and that was it.
Stefanie called me that same week to ask if she could pay me back for her and Ruben’s share of the van, a little at a time. I told her no. I told her it was for Mom.
She sounded relieved, and I let her be.
Then the van. Mom wanted one car, so I rented one car. Twelve seats, for five of us and a cooler.
In June Mom called me on a Sunday night.
“Ellen called today,” she said. “She’s flying in from Tucson. Can you believe that? She kept saying what a wonderful thing this is. She said, ‘Bernice, that’s a lot of house.'”
“It is a lot of house,” I said.
I was proud of it. I didn’t ask her who Ellen thought she was thanking.
The house came with a host, a man named Harris who signed every single text with a little fish. He sent the door code to my phone at six this morning. My phone only. The booking was in my name.
And this morning, four hours in, we stopped at a Love’s for gas.
I came out with Mom’s coffee and Ruben was over by the ice machine with his back to the van, on his phone.
“It’s handled, Ma,” he said. “I told you. Don’t send anything else.”
I figured she’d offered him gas money. I remember thinking, well, at least somebody had.
Now my mother’s name was on his foot, and he was hopping toward the hose.
The hose by the boat shed
There was a green hose on a hook at the corner of the house, where the yard dropped down toward the water and the boat shed.
Ruben got there in about six hops.
He cranked the spigot all the way open and stuck one foot under it, then the other, then both at once. In a minute he was standing in a puddle of his own making, his jeans going dark to the shin.
The gold went first. Gel pen runs. HAPPY 70TH BERNICE turned into a gold smear, and the smear ran down between his toes and into the mud.
The pink didn’t move.
Not one fleck.
“It’s not coming off,” he said. “Why isn’t it coming off?”
Aoife was standing next to me by then. She tugged my sleeve.
“It’s the chunky kind,” she said, not nearly as quietly as she thought. “You have to soak it in foil. It says on the bottle. Fourteen days of sparkle.”
“FOURTEEN DAYS?”
Half the porch heard that.
Kara had come down off the steps with her drink in one hand and her phone in the other. She was filming him openly now, walking around him in a slow circle like he was a used car she was thinking about.
“Kara, put it down,” Stefanie said.
“I’m documenting,” Kara said.
Ellen came down next, careful, one hand on the railing and her big purse over the other arm. She dug around in it and came up with a pack of baby wipes. She pulled one out and handed it to him like it was going to help.
It didn’t help. The wipe came away gold and his toes stayed pink.
Stefanie walked straight over to me.
“Fix it,” she said. “Right now. We have a reservation at seven and he’s got those sneakers and one pair of flip-flops. That’s it. That’s what he packed.”
I hadn’t thought about the flip-flops.
I’ll be honest. For about ten seconds I felt bad.
So I went back to the van and dug through my toiletry bag for the little bottle of remover I keep for the chipped nails I’m always too busy to redo. It was maybe a third full. I brought it down to the hose with a fistful of cotton balls and knelt on the wet grass in front of my sister’s husband.
That is not a place I ever expected to be.
“Hold still,” I said.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. Then, “Fine. Hurry up.”
I soaked a cotton ball, pressed it on his big toe and rubbed.
The polish went soft all at once. It didn’t come off. It went everywhere. The glitter let go of the nail and grabbed the cotton, and the cotton dragged it across the top of his toe and onto the next toe and into the little dark hairs on his knuckles. In thirty seconds his whole foot had a pink shine, like he’d stepped in a craft store.
The rhinestone heart came loose and stuck to my thumb.
Quentin had walked down from the porch with his beer to get a look. He leaned over us.
“Well, now it’s the whole foot, Rube,” he said.
“Stop,” Ruben said. “Stop, stop, stop. You’re making it worse.”
“You could’ve just put it on the floor,” Quentin said. “Like a person.”
Ruben didn’t answer him. He was looking at me.
“You did this in front of my mother,” he said. “You understand that? My MOTHER.”
I rocked onto my heels and pulled the heart off my thumb and stuck it on the back of my phone case, because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
Then I did the other foot. Ellen was holding out cotton balls by then, one at a time.
When I straightened up again, the little bottle in my hand was empty.
His right foot was pink to the ankle now, glitter in the hair.
The keypad on the screen door
Ruben pulled his foot away from me and went up the porch steps two at a time, leaving wet pink prints on every board.
Nobody stopped him. Everybody shifted out of the way, the way you get out of the way of a dog that’s just been in the lake.
“I need a shower,” he said. “Real soap. Hot water. Somebody tell me where a bathroom is.”
The front door had one of those keypads above the handle. Black, with a little light on it.
He punched four numbers. Red light.
He punched four more. Red.
“What’s the code?” he said to Stefanie.
“I don’t have it.”
“Why don’t you have it?”
“Because I didn’t book it, Ruben.”
She said it fast and low and then looked down at the boards.
He turned around on the top step. He had the whole porch in front of him. Twenty-two people, a banner and a hot tub, and he was standing in the middle of it in wet jeans with his feet sparkling.
I think he decided right then that the best thing to do was keep going.
“You know what? This is what she does,” he said. “This is exactly what she does. Since March. She books a house, so it’s her house. She rents a van, so it’s her van, so she gets to say where your feet go. I can’t take a shower without asking her permission.”
“Ruben,” Mom said.
“No, Bernice, I’m sorry. Happy birthday. I mean it. But somebody’s got to say it, and nobody in this family ever will, because she’s the one with the card.”
Nobody on the porch said anything to that.
Kara had stopped filming. She had the phone down by her hip, still on, pointed at the boards.
“She doesn’t even like us,” Ruben said. “She likes paying. There’s a difference. She likes everybody knowing who paid.”
I had my phone in my hand. Harris’s text was at the top of the screen, with the little fish after it.
I didn’t want to give it to him. I’ll admit that. I wanted him to stand there and drip for a while.
Mom squeezed my arm.
“Maryann,” she said. “Give the man the code so he can get cleaned up. Please. I want to go inside.”
So I started up the steps.
Ellen had come up behind him, with a used wipe still balled in her fist. She put her hand flat on his back, between his shoulders.
“Honey,” she said. “It’s your house. Isn’t the code in your email from the rental people?”
The red circle
Kara turned her phone face down against her leg.
Quentin picked his beer up off the railing and then didn’t drink it.
Ruben said, “Ma.”
Only that. The way you’d say it if your mother had started telling a story about you at your own wedding.
Ellen didn’t hear it the way he meant it. She was already digging in the big purse again, because Ellen is a woman who shows you pictures whether you asked or not.
“Bernice, I have to show you. He sent me all of these back in March,” she said. “I showed my whole Tuesday group. I said, my son did this for his wife’s mother. Can you imagine? Look. Look at the dock.”
She held the phone out to Mom.
Mom didn’t take it. Mom was looking at me.
So Ellen turned the screen to the person standing closest to her, which was me, on the second step.
It was a text thread. RUBEN across the top, and a little round picture of him in a Chiefs hat.
The dock at sunset.
The white kitchen.
The hot tub.
The corner bedroom with the big window on the water, and a red circle around the bed drawn with somebody’s finger, and MOM written inside it in crooked letters.
My letters. From my car. On my lunch.
I’d sent that picture to exactly one person.
Under it, a blue bubble.
“Got Bernice the lake house for her 70th. My treat. Don’t say anything to Stef about the price, she worries.”
And under that, Ellen’s gray bubble.
“Oh Ruben I am so PROUD of you.”
And a whole row of hearts, more than Stefanie sent.
I scrolled up once with my thumb. Ellen let me. There was nothing above it but a birthday text from last year and a picture of a casserole.
“Isn’t it something?” Ellen said. “And he wouldn’t let me help. I had to fight him.”
Ruben came down one step. He held his hand out.
“Ma, give me the phone.”
“I’m showing Maryann.”
“She’s seen it.”
He was right about that.
I could feel Stefanie behind me on the gravel without turning around. I could feel Mom’s hand still on my elbow, light, the way she holds onto a railing she doesn’t need.
I gave the phone back to Ellen. I didn’t say a word about the circle. I didn’t have to point at anything.
Ellen looked at the screen. Then at me. Then she looked at the picture again, for a long time, at the red circle and the crooked letters.
Then she looked up at Ruben, standing on the top step in his wet jeans, and her mouth moved like she was doing a sum.
Under the circle, in his blue bubble, it still said: My treat.
Five hundred dollars
“Okay,” Ruben said. “Okay. Everybody just hang on a second.”
He came down another step, so he was level with his mother, and he put both hands up like a man calming a horse.
“Ma, it’s a family thing. It’s all one family. It doesn’t matter whose card it went on. Me and Stef were always gonna square up with her.”
“When?” I said.
It was the only thing I said for a while.
“When it was handled. Jesus, Maryann.” He turned to the porch. “You see? You see what she does? Twenty years, she’s been like this. Everything has to have her name on it. Every Christmas, every birthday. Her name, in big letters, so everybody knows.”
Kara laughed, one short bark, and then put her hand over her mouth, because he was standing there with my mother’s name smeared gold between his toes.
Ruben heard it. He went redder.
“Ruben,” Ellen said. “You told me it was yours.”
“I said it was handled, Ma. I said don’t worry about it.”
“You said my treat.” She held the phone up between them. “It’s right here. My treat. I read it to the Tuesday group out loud.”
“So I put it nice. So what? You were happy. Everybody was happy.”
“I sent you five hundred dollars toward it,” Ellen said.
That went across the porch slower than the feet had.
“In April,” she said. “You told me not to. I sent it anyway. You called me this morning and told me not to send anything else.”
The Love’s. The ice machine. His back to the van.
Ruben studied the gravel. Then he looked right back up, and he had his grin on again, though it didn’t fit his face anymore.
“And it went to the house, basically.”
“Basically,” Ellen said.
“The truck needed tires, Ma. All four. You want me driving Stef around on bald tires? I was gonna put it back before you even noticed. It’s five hundred dollars. It’s not like she needed it.” He pointed at me. “Look at her. She’s got a house on the lake for the weekend.”
Nobody laughed at that. Kara put her phone in her back pocket.
Quentin set his bottle back down on the railing, very carefully, like it might go off.
Ellen sat down on the porch swing. She didn’t say anything else. She had the phone in both hands in her lap, screen up, the red circle still on it.
Ruben turned back to me. He dropped his voice, like the twenty-two people on the porch couldn’t hear him from six feet away.
“Just tell her we split it,” he said. “That’s all. Tell her it was both of us. You want to do this on your mother’s birthday? In front of everybody? Just say we split it and we all go inside.”
I looked at Mom.
Mom didn’t help me. She didn’t shake her head and she didn’t nod. She just stood there in her lavender cardigan on the gravel, holding her own purse now, waiting to see what I’d do.
I went up the last two steps, past him.
I typed Harris’s four numbers into the keypad.
The light went green.
I held the screen door open, and my mother walked in first.
Stefanie’s keys
Ruben stayed out on the top step.
“Stef,” he said. “Tell them.”
Stefanie was still down by the van. She hadn’t moved since the hose. She had the keys in her hand, and she was turning them over and over, the way she used to turn her retainer case over in the back of Dad’s wagon.
“Tell them what?” she said.
“Tell them how it was. Tell them we were gonna pay her back.”
“I told you in March,” Stefanie said.
He opened his mouth.
“In the Applebee’s parking lot,” she said. “You showed me what you sent your mom. I said, Ruben, tell her the truth before she tells the whole state of Arizona. And you said she’d never find out because Maryann would never say anything. Because Maryann never says anything.”
She walked up onto the grass. She didn’t come to me. She went to the swing and stood in front of Ellen.
“It was Maryann’s card, Ellen,” she said. “The house and the van. All of it. He brought the cooler.”
Ellen nodded. She kept nodding, longer than you’d need to.
“I’d like my five hundred dollars, Ruben,” she said.
“Ma. Not here.”
“Then where?” Ellen said. “You tell me where. You’ve been telling me everything else.”
He didn’t have anything for that. Then he did, because Ruben always does.
“You know what, fine,” he said. “Fine. I’ll pay her back. I’ll pay everybody back. I’ll write it on a napkin at dinner, how about that? Five hundred to my mother. Forty-two hundred to the queen of the lake. You want the van too, Maryann? You want a cut of the air?”
“Ruben,” Ellen said, “sit down.”
“I’m not a kid, Ma.”
“Then quit sounding like one in front of Bernice.”
He looked around the porch for somebody. Anybody. His eyes went to Kara, who looked at her drink, and to Quentin, who looked at the lake, and to the cousins along the rail, who all found something on their phones that wasn’t him.
He stood on the step with his sneakers still hanging from one hand. Then he dropped them, and they hit the boards one after the other, and he sat down right there on the top step with his pink feet out in front of him and didn’t say anything at all.
That was more than I’d ever seen him not say.
Stefanie turned around to me then, and this is the part I didn’t plan for.
“And you,” she said. “Did it have to be in front of everybody? Did it have to be his feet?”
“He put them in my hair, Stef.”
“I know where he put them. I was driving.”
She held the van keys out to me. I took them. She went past me into the house without looking, and I heard her go up the stairs, and I heard a door shut somewhere on the second floor.
She didn’t talk to me at dinner. She sat at the far end with Ruben, who wore the flip-flops, and when the waitress said, “Oh, cute toes,” nobody at that table laughed.
Ellen sat by Mom. She paid for her own dinner and Ruben’s, and nobody stopped her.
On the porch, before we left for the restaurant, Aoife came and found me with the pouch open. She was holding up the polish bottle to the porch light.
There was maybe a quarter inch left in the bottom.
“Mom,” she said, “there’s barely any left for Grandma.”
Sunday, past the water tower
We left Table Rock a little after ten on Sunday.
Stefanie and Ruben rode home with Quentin. She said it was because his truck had more room for the cooler. Nobody argued. Ellen had flown out of Springfield that morning, and she’d hugged my mother for a long time at the curb, and she’d hugged me too, quick, like she was embarrassed to.
Kara’s video never went anywhere. She showed it to me Saturday night on the dock, the whole thing, the hops and the hose and the wipe, and then she held the phone so I could see her thumb press delete. “For Aunt Bernie,” she said. “Not for him.”
So it was the three of us in the twelve-seat van.
I drove. Mom rode up front beside me. Aoife had the whole back row to herself and fell asleep before we crossed into Kansas.
On Saturday, on the dock, Aoife had painted her grandma’s toes with the last quarter inch of Bubblegum Riot. All ten. It came out thin, and she’d had to go over the little toes twice. And she’d taken the rhinestone heart off the back of my phone case and pressed it onto Mom’s right big toe, with a dot of glue from the pouch.
The other heart is somewhere in the yard at Table Rock. Nobody looked very hard.
Somewhere outside that town with the water tower painted like a hot air balloon, we hit the same pothole, or one just like it.
Mom took her sandal off.
She put her bare foot up on the armrest between our seats, close enough to brush my arm. Ten pink toes, the heart catching the sun.
My phone buzzed in the cup holder. It was Stefanie. It said: “Home.” That was the whole text.
Mom wiggled her toes.
“Is this all right?” she said. “Or do I need a nap?”
“Leave it,” I said.
I shifted the coffee to the other cup holder and drove.
If you’ve ever paid for the whole weekend and still got told it was a little much, pass this one to the sister who would understand.
For more family drama and hard-won payback, read the wife given ninety minutes to leave, the daughter whose stepfather mocked her dress, and the grandma who finally called out her husband’s joke.
