The Plate My Mother Denied Me

I stayed in our hometown. It is a small town in eastern Nebraska, the kind of place where the grain elevator is the tallest thing for twenty miles and everybody knows whose truck that is going by. I run the office for a farm equipment dealership out on the highway, which means I know exactly what things cost and exactly how to make a budget stretch and exactly how to plan an event down to the last folding chair, because I have planned every family event since I was old enough to be handed the job. Kevin moved to Omaha and does something in commercial real estate that he explains at holidays in a way designed to make everyone feel a little slower than him. He drives a car that costs more than my house payment for a year. He is, by every measure my mother uses, the success. I am the one who stayed.

So when my mother called me last spring about her seventieth birthday, I already knew what the call was.

“You’re so good at these things,” she said. “You’ll take care of it, won’t you? Nothing too fussy. Just somewhere nice. All the family, the Bergstroms, the ladies from church, the Hollands from the old neighborhood. You know everyone. You’ll know just what to do.”

I said of course. I always said of course. I want to be honest that a part of me was glad to be asked, because being asked was the closest my mother came to saying she trusted me, and I had spent my whole life mistaking being trusted with the work for being loved. I told myself this one would be different. She was turning seventy. I would make it beautiful. I would make it so beautiful that she would look around at the end of the night and understand, without my having to say it, everything I had done for her over the years.

I reserved the Cardinal Room at Halvorsen’s, which is the nicest room in three counties, a supper club out on the lake road with dark wood and a fieldstone fireplace and a chandelier that came out of an old hotel in Lincoln. I put down the deposit myself, seven hundred dollars, on my own card. I met with the events manager, a calm man named Curtis who had run that dining room for eleven years and had a way of writing everything down in a leather folder and making you feel like nothing could go wrong. I chose the menu at a tasting, prime rib and walleye and the twice-baked potatoes the whole county drives out there for. I ordered white hydrangeas and eucalyptus from the florist on Main because my mother had carried hydrangeas at her own wedding. I told Curtis to keep my card on file for the balance, whatever it came to, and not to bother anyone else about it.

I even bought a dress. This is a small thing and it is not a small thing. I do not buy dresses. I own two, one for funerals and one for church, both of them a color that is polite about not being noticed. But I passed a shop in Omaha one afternoon and there was a red dress in the window, a deep true red, and I stood on the sidewalk longer than I want to admit, and then I went in and I bought it and I did not look at the price until I was in the car. I told myself I would wear it to my mother’s party. For once in my life I wanted to be a person somebody noticed in a room, instead of the person making the room work.