There will be no divine intervention for me this morning; I’m going to this engagement party whether I like it or not. I spend most of the flight imagining (or is it dreading?) my reunion with Shannon and what’s to come. Since it’s a gathering thrown in her honor, at least she won’t be able to avoid me. Not the whole time, anyway.
I thought by flying in from out of town the day before the party I’d be spared most of the preparations, an assumption thatis swiftly corrected when I leave the terminal and find my mother waiting for me at arrivals.
I can tell right away she means business: she’s got a full face of makeup on but is head to toe in athleisure, her sunglasses perched atop her asymmetric bob. She bestows a kiss on my cheek, then rubs the residue of her lipstick away with her thumb.
“Let’s go,” she instructs me. “We have to get to Costco.”
Her shopping list is enormous. She carries around a little clipboard while I push the shopping cart, efficiently ticking off each item as we make our way up and down the aisles.
“We’ll get these for your uncle,” she says, loading a bag of fat-free chips into the cart, her flip-flops smacking against her heels as she moves. “He needs to be more mindful of his cholesterol. You know they put him on those pills?”
I didnot.
We go until the cart is piled so high that I can barely maneuver it. I narrowly avoid mowing down a small child when I swing it around the end of the frozen aisle.
Mom maintains a steady stream of conversational nothings as we go, filling me in on all the latest happenings with our neighbors, and then my cousins, and even a tidbit about our dentist, who’s been gettingawfully closeto his new hygienist.
—
I feel a rush of nostalgia when we pull up to the house, a picture-perfect snapshot of suburban living with its chestnut-brown roof and rolling green lawn. For as much as I say that I hate it here, it always feels good to come home. It’s tranquil in a way that living in the city simply is not.
Dad is hard at work when we park up on the driveway,wandering around with his pressure washer and spraying down the stone tiles outside our front door. He playfully douses the passenger-side window with water when Mom stops the car, a little comedy bit he’s been doing since my sister and I were teenagers and first learning to drive.
His shoulders slope more than they did back then, and the bald crown on his head has gradually expanded outward, but the beat-up khaki shorts and the blue button-down he wears for housework are as they ever were. The blessing and the curse of this place has always been the same: time passes, but nothing changes.
It takes me three sweaty trips to and from the car to get all the groceries inside, and Mom graciously allows me ten minutes to shower before I have to be back downstairs to help prep the veggies.
I sit at the worn oak table, my wet hair soaking the shoulders of my faded 2004 Track and Field Stars T-shirt. At the kitchen island, Mom gathers the ingredients for her famous oniondip.
“Your sister will be here tomorrow around noon,” she says, spooning the contents of the sour cream tub into the glass mixing bowl at her side.
“Great.” I keep my focus firmly on the celery in front of me, chopping a stalk down the middle with a solid thwack.
“Make sure those sticks are even.”
“They are.”
“And I hope you’ll be on your best behavior,” she adds, looking up from under her brows.
I mirror the action, tilting my chin down and my eyes up. “I will.”
“This is a big day for her,” she says, sprinkling her spice mix over the bowl. “We don’t want any…drama.”
“I’ve got it, Mom. I’ll be good.”
“Good,” she says, wiping her hands on her pink checkered apron. “Now where did I put that serving tray?”
—
The food prep alone takes us several hours. I catch glimpses of my dad now and then, but mostly he’s consumed by yard work until well after the sun goes down.
I buzz around the house like a diligent little worker bee, performing every chore my mother assigns to me until I finally collapse into bed around midnight and fall into a dreamless sleep. It feels like seconds have passed when she flings my bedroom door open the next morning. The alarm clock beside my head blinks 6:45a.m.
“Get moving,” she tells me without so much as a good morning. “We need to finish setting up the backyard.”
—
Forgive me for feeling less than enthused about this party, because it’s the second time I’m attending it. My sister Shannon’s first engagement party was a little over two years ago. That wedding was never to be.
