Chapter 5 - The Kitchen Sink
Twenty minutes later, the dining room was empty except for my father and me.
Everyone else had drifted into the living room, sitting on the edges of their upholstered chairs like strangers waiting for a train that had been delayed by weather. Emily had tried to turn on the radio, but my mother had come out of the kitchen and told her to turn it off because "the noise gave her a migraine," so now they sat in total silence, listening to the snow hit the double-paned glass of the front window.
I sat at the kitchen table, which was covered in a yellow oilcloth with faded lemons on it. This was where my father actually lived—not in the formal dining room with the silver gravy boat, but here, under the harsh fluorescent light of a ceiling fixture that buzzed like a trapped beetle.
My mother was standing at the sink, running hot water over the gravy boat she had retrieved from the sideboard. She hadn't spoken to me since she came back into the room, but every time she scrubbed at the porcelain with the green scouring pad, she pressed down hard enough to make the plastic squeak.
My father sat across from me, Lily still sleeping against his shoulder. He had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his cardigan so she could rest against his cotton shirt, her small head rising and falling with his breath.
"She needs a winter coat," my father said quietly, nodding toward Lily’s pink snowsuit, which was lying across the back of an empty chair to dry. "The one she has is too thin for January."
"I have one ordered," I said. "It’s coming on Tuesday."
"Don't wait for it to come in the mail. Take my car tomorrow. Go to the Sears in town. Get the blue one with the hood."
"Dad, I can buy my own coat."
"I know you can," he said, and for the first time, a small, dry smile touched the corners of his mouth. "That doesn't mean I can't buy my granddaughter a coat."
At the sink, the water was running full blast. My mother’s hands stopped moving. She stood there for a long time, staring down into the stainless-steel basin where the soapsuds were swirling around the drain.
"You’re going to let her stay," she said to the wall.
"She’s staying," my father said.
"And the rest of them?"
"They’ll eat when the turkey’s warm."
My mother turned around, drying her hands on a dish towel that had a embroidered rooster on it from 1984. Her eyes weren't angry anymore; they looked tired—the kind of tired that comes from decades of keeping track of every spoon, every napkin, every slight, real or imagined.
"You didn't tell me you invited them," she said, her voice dropping into something that sounded almost like an accusation, though it had lost its teeth.
"You wouldn't have let me," my father said simply. "You would have told me Clara had the flu or the house was too small or the plumbing was acting up again."
"It is small."
"It’s four bedrooms, Helen. For two people."
She didn't answer. She walked over to the kitchen table, pulled out the chair next to mine—the one with the grease stain on the cushion—and sat down. She looked at Lily’s small, red-tinged ear, then up at my face.
"You look like hell," she said.
The words weren't kind, but they weren't cruel either. They were just an observation of fact, the kind of thing one tired woman says to another when the sun is going down behind the gray hills and the snow is piling up against the back door.
"Thanks," I said. "Three-month sleep regression."
"Give her here," my mother said.
My whole body went stiff. I looked at my father. He didn't look back at me; he just shifted Lily slightly, her small, warm body sliding from his cardigan into my mother’s arms with a smoothness that suggested he had done this before, forty years ago, when the house was new and the wainscoting was still white.
My mother didn't hold her like an expert. She held her the way someone holds a fragile piece of pottery they aren't sure they have the receipt for—arms stiff, her chin tilted up, her breath held.
Lily didn't wake up. She gave a small, bubbling sigh, her face pressing against the plum-colored wool of my mother’s sweater.
"She’s heavy," my mother whispered.
"She’s eleven pounds," I said.
"Your brother was nine pounds at birth. He broke my ribs."
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"I know. You told me every year on my birthday."
A tiny, dry sound came from my mother’s throat—something that might have been a laugh if she had practiced it recently. She didn't move for five minutes. She just sat there under the buzzing fluorescent light, her hands curved around the baby’s back, her eyes fixed on the grain of the yellow oilcloth where the lemons were starting to peel at the corners.
