The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

“Now, Barb, you’ll have to forgive us, we’re just getting used to all this. Kristen has always brought things home. Birds. That awful three-legged cat. She dated a boy for two years whose father is chief of surgery at the hospital, lovely family, and we all thought, well. But she has always had a heart for a project.”

Nobody said anything.

“Mom,” Kristen said.

“I’m paying you a compliment, sweetheart.”

“I climbed forty feet in a lightning storm to get your daughter’s lights on,” Dustin said, pleasantly enough. “I don’t know as I’m the cat.”

“Of course not.” Pam patted the tablecloth near his hand without touching it. “And it’s good, steady work. Somebody has to do it.”

“Somebody does,” I said. “I think about that every time I flip a switch.”

Steve laughed. Pam did not.

It went on about like that. She asked whether I had ever been to the club before, and when I said I had been out a few times on business, she said, “Oh, deliveries,” and I said, “Something like that.” She asked where I summered. I said Logan County. She told a long story about a member-guest tournament and a caterer who had let her down.

She asked whether Dustin planned to stay with the co-op, or whether he had thought about something with more of a future, since Steve was always looking for good people on the sales floor.

“He’d have to learn to wear a tie,” Steve said.

“I own a tie,” Dustin said.

“One,” I said, and my son smiled in spite of himself.

At no point did I say what the plant took in last year. At no point did I say I had thirty-one people depending on me for their mortgages, or that two of the fairways I could see from my chair were green because of a blend that came off my number three line.

I would like to tell you I kept quiet out of wisdom. Mostly I was watching Kristen.

She had not eaten four bites. She kept looking from her mother to me, and every time Pam landed one, that girl flinched like she had been the one hit.

When the plates were cleared, Pam stood and smoothed her dress.

“Kristen, the Hendersons are at the big table inside. Jim’s the board president now, and Carol specifically asked if you were coming. Come say hello. Bring Dustin, I suppose.” She turned the smile on me. “Barb, you’ll be fine out here, won’t you? Just flag one of the girls if you need anything. You’ll know how.”

It was said lightly. It was meant to land, and it landed.

Dustin started to get up. Not to go with her. I knew the look.

“Go see the board president,” I told him. “Shake his hand. Be your daddy’s son.”

“Mom.”

“Go on.”

He went, stiff in the shoulders. Steve went. Pam put her hand out for Kristen the way you would reach for a purse.

Kristen did not take it.

“I’m going to sit with Barb,” she said.

“Sweetheart, Carol asked for you.”

“Tell Carol I said hi.”

“Kristen.” Pam’s voice dropped. “These are the people who matter here.”

Kristen pulled out the chair next to mine, the one facing the kitchen door, and sat down in it.

“I know who matters, Mom,” she said.

Pam stood there a second longer. Then she went inside, heels clicking, and the French doors shut behind her.

It was quiet on the terrace. A mower was running somewhere far off. Kristen let out a breath that seemed to come up from her shoes.