3 Days
WHAT DID YOUput in these cookies?” I’m on my sixth and I can’t stop.
Hall is aloof. “The ingredients. You were there last night, you saw.”
“You had to have added something extra. These taste too good to be normal cookies.”
“I added love.” He clears his throat. “In the general sense, of course. Love is in the air. Love is all around us.” He looks like he wants to shoot straight up through the ceiling with a jet pack.
“It certainly is,” adds Mom as she passes by, grabbing a cookie. She pats Hall on the head. “Thank you, son-in-law.”
His gaze moves sharply to mine, but I have to look away. She’s going to be so disappointed when a wedding never happens.
Hall bustles over to the dishwasher to unload it, but Athena beats him there. This is no coincidence. When Hall cleared the dishes from the table after dinner, Grandpa was so exuberant in his gratitude that my siblings were bothered. If somebody receivespositive attention, that is attention the others are not receiving. Listening to Hall praise everybody has Felix peer-pressure-complimenting Marilou more often. Dad mentioned privately to my sisters and me that Hall is “growing on him,” so Athena is now talking up her husband’s alleged positive attributes. This flattery, in turn, has prompted him to behave extra generously. Sean has asked me twice if I need assistance opening my drinks.
The drive behind these behavioral changes isn’t altruistic, but when somebody is kind to you, you tend to be kind back, so we’re in the midst of an odd paying-it-forward train that is just as alien as it is surprisingly pleasant. Kaia has even been putting her phone and iPad down to join in family conversations.
“Hurry up, Betts!” Dad barks from the living room. “We’re about to press play!”
I wander into the living room with my seventh cookie as Mom pops a tape into the VHS player. “What’s that?” Ichabod asks.
“A videocassette tape,” Dad tells him. “It’s like a DVD.”
Avenue folds up a used Band-Aid and flicks it at Ichabod’s ear. “What’s a DVD?”
“It’s Netflix for old people,” Domino replies, as I feel my ancient, brittle bones dissolve.
“When your parents were little,” Mom explains gently to her grandchildren, “we would record them on the camcorder.” Thankfully, there are no tapes here memorializing me as an awkward teenager, as Grandma only has the old videocassettes.
On the screen, a much younger Hughes family is at a campground, but my working memory of this trip is obsolete. Mom’s voice is overly loud, which my off-camera father remarks on. “Oh, shush,” Present-Day Mom says in unison with her younger self. “I have to talk loud, or the sound won’t pick up!”
“Listen to Dad!” Kaia laughs. “Your accent was so much stronger!”
Dad glowers. “I sound the same.”
The camcorder pivots, capturing Dad in his full thirtysomething glory: spiky brown hair, a blue sweater with artistic holes around the collar, svelte.
“Who’s that?” Minnesota Moon asks, and Dad hollers.
“What do you mean, who’sthat? That’s me.”
She looks him up and down. “Doesn’t look like you.”
He points at her. “Watch your mouth.”
“You know, sometimes I forget how he landed you,” Grandma remarks to her daughter. “I remember now. Although I still say you got married too young.”
“You married young, too.”
“We can’t all be the exception to marriage statistics, darling.”
We all scream when we’re blessed with Great-Grandma (rest her soul) in culottes and a fanny pack. She shields her face from the camera, pushing Mom away, who films a chubby-cheeked Kaia waddling around in a diaper. Little Athena is unrecognizable with her brown ponytail. In the distance, Grandpa is fishing at the edge of a lake. Felix stands next to him, shirtless and deeply suntanned, his scraggly mullet sun-brightened nearly to blond. His kids immediately yowl in reaction to his hair.
“It was the style,” he and Mom both insist.
“Where’s little Bettie?” Grandpa (present-day) asks, five seconds before (younger) Dad asks the same question.
“She’s in time-out,” we all hear Mom respond. She turns and zooms in on a scowling little creature in a blue bucket hat and pink jellies, wispy black hair in pigtails. Little Bettie is bouncing on a metal and plastic lawn chair, kicking up rocks. The screengoes black for a few seconds; when the video flickers back on, we’re no longer at the campground.
