I shake my head. “I don’t care what anybody thinks.”
“Really?”
I nod. “Really.”
She studies me like there’s a seam in it somewhere, and if she stares hard enough, she’ll catch where it’s glued. “How do you do that?”
I shrug. “I remind myself that whatever a guy thinks about me is about him. Not me. Somebody decides I’m a charity case coasting on my girlfriend’s last name — that’s just a story he’s telling himself, so he feels better about wherever he washed up. Got nothing to do with me. So I don’t pick it up. It’s not mine, I don’t carry it.”
“Can you teach me?”
She means it as a joke. I decline to take it as one.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can teach you that.”
She holds my eyes a second, and something behind them shifts like she’s quietly lifting me out of one column and setting me down in another, and I have the rare, good sense to say nothing while she does it. Then she sits up, scrubs her face with the heel of her hand, brisk, finished, and swings her legs off the bed.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. “Okay.”
“You good?”
“I had too much wine and needed a minute. That’s the story.”
“It’s a believable story. You’ve put a glass and a half on top of two green beans and a forkful of stuffing — you genuinely are that woman.”
“It’s the only story I’ve got.” She stands, checks herself in the mirror, and fixes one piece of hair that didn’t need fixing. “How do I look?”
“Like a woman who had a little too much wine and needed a minute.”
“Good.”
I get up. At the door, she stops with her hand on the knob and turns back, and for a second, she just looks at me, working something through, and whatever it is, I let her carry it all the way to the end on her own.
“Thank you,” she says. “For not making it a thing.”
“Linwood, I am world-class at making things a joke. This is me showing restraint, live, in real time, at an enormous personal expense. Frame it. Put it over the mantel. Remember it forever.”
A small smile grows on her face when she opens the door.
Downstairs, the dining room has gone soft at the edges, slumped into the back half of a holiday — chairs turned sideways, coffee out, one of Ricardo’s kids asleep in his arms, every big man in the room gone slow and heavy with food. Carolyn’s turning down help with the dishes for what sounds like the fourth time. Coach is topping off wine he has no intention of drinking.
We come in not touching, just two people walking, and the whole table looks at us. Every eye lifts at once and drops at once and pretends, as one body, that it never noticed we left.
Margaret catches my arm as I pass. “There you are. Everything all right?”
Except for my mother.
“She had a bit much wine,” I say. “Needed a minute.”
My mother holds my eyes a beat past comfortable — that exact look she’s been aiming at me since I came down the stairs this morning in another man’s shirt — and then she pats my arm and lets me go, and lets it go.
Aspen drops back into her chair. Aunt Lisa, without even turning her head, lifts Aspen’s fork off the plate and puts it back in her hand, and Aspen takes it and eats a bite of a pie she didn’t ask for, and the old woman goes back to her coffee.
I sit down across from her.
Hodge is deep into a story about a road trip in ‘09 that I’d put money on having grown a few miles every year since. McCallister’s actually laughing at it, head tipped back — second real laugh I’ve seen out of the man today. Beth’s got her shoes off under her chair. The light coming through the windows has gone gold and low and long, that one good hour at the back of a holiday before anybody’s rude enough to start hunting for a coat.
Under the runner, I find Aspen’s foot with mine.
