The Dinner She Was Told to Skip

“I know you are,” I said. “Right this minute, you are. Sit down and eat.”

He sat in the sixth chair.

It was a strange supper after that, and then, somehow, a good one.

Connie would not give Ben back. She ate with one hand, like me. Mr. Lindgren asked whether he might hold “the little girl,” and I passed Lucy across to him, and that big man took her in both hands as carefully as you’d carry a full cup of coffee.

When the plates were cleared (Jeff and Chad cleared, and Connie told me to keep my seat), Chad brought out the cobbler from the barbecue place in its foil pan.

“Is that all there is?” Connie asked. “I thought I smelled cinnamon when we came in.”

Chad stood there with the cobbler.

“There are apple bars,” I said. “In the pantry, second shelf, under a dish towel.”

“Who made those?”

“I did. Thursday night.”

“Between feedings,” Connie said. It wasn’t a question.

“Between the eleven and the two.”

She looked at Chad for a long moment. Then she said, “We’ll have the bars.”

He brought them. Mr. Lindgren ate three, with Lucy asleep against his sport coat.

They left a little after nine. Connie put Ben into my arms at the door and then kept her hands on my shoulders.

“My number is in that gift bag,” she said. “It’s on the card. I’m in Johnston. That’s thirty minutes, and I am a retired woman with a full tank of gas. You call me. I don’t care if it’s about nothing.”

“I will,” I said.

Then the taillights went off down the brick street, and it was only us and the dishes.

I put the twins down. When I came back, slow on the stairs, Chad was standing in the dining room with the monitor receiver in his hand, turning it over.

“You could have warned me,” he said.

“About what?”

“That it was on. That they could hear. Beth, do you understand what that looked like? In front of him? You made me look like…”

He stopped.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Like what?”

He didn’t answer.

“I didn’t make you look like anything, Chad. I fed your children and I hummed. The only thing anybody heard me say was what you told me this afternoon. If it sounded bad coming out of that speaker, it’s because it was bad when you said it in the doorway.”

“I was trying to…”

“I know what you were trying to do. You were trying to have a nice clean house with no bottles and no pump and no swing and no wife. You took your own children’s picture off the refrigerator.”

He put the receiver down on the tablecloth.

“I’m not going to shout,” I said. I was surprised how steady it came out. “And I’m not leaving. Not tonight. But I want you to hear me. I am never going upstairs in my own house again because somebody is coming. Not for your boss. Not for your mother. Not for anybody. If I’m not fit to be seen, then neither is this family, because this is what it looks like right now.”

He sat down in the sixth chair, the one from the garage, and put his face in his hands.

“I looked at you Thursday night,” he said through his fingers. “On that stool. And I thought, he’s going to walk in here and think I can’t even keep my own house together. I thought you were what was wrong with the picture.”

“I know you did.”