The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

The second Sunday she brought a pie. It was a strawberry rhubarb she had made herself from a recipe on her phone, and the bottom crust was raw as putty and the top had gone the color of a saddle. She set it on my counter like it was a patient she was not sure about.

We ate it anyway. All of it. Dustin had two pieces and told her it was the best pie he ever had, and she threw a dish towel at his head.

That afternoon she and I sat on the back steps while he changed the oil in my truck.

“She told me he’s a phase,” Kristen said. “My mom. She said I’d get tired of supper at five-thirty and a man who comes home smelling like creosote. She said, think about what your life will look like.”

“What will it look like?”

She watched my son’s boots sticking out from under the pickup.

“Like this, I hope,” she said.

I nearly told her then. It was right in my mouth. Honey, you will never have to worry, not one day, there is more in that plant than your daddy has in all three car lots.

I swallowed it.

She had picked the lineman and the sloping kitchen floor and the woman in the cardigan with her eyes wide open, believing that was all there was. Nobody was ever going to be able to take that away from her, or say different. I was not going to be the one to muddy it. Not yet.

It was the second week of June when Tom called.

Tom is the grounds superintendent at Sangamon Ridge. I have known him since 2009, when he drove up to Mount Pulaski in a club pickup because the blend he was getting out of a broker in Chicago had come up full of weeds, and he wanted to look a seed cleaner in the eye. He has bought every pound of fairway and rough seed from me since.

“Barb, the grounds supply agreement’s up,” he said. “Three years this time. The board changed the rules last fall, though. Anything over a hundred thousand, the owner has to come sign in front of the grounds committee. No reps.”

“Who’s on the committee?”

He read me five names. The fourth one was Steve Whitlock.

I sat at my desk a minute with the phone in my hand.

I had been the same woman on that terrace as I was at my own desk, and it did not seem right to start hiding one from the other.

“What time?” I said.

“Thursday, four o’clock. Board room.”

Thursday I wore my navy slacks and my good flats and the cream cardigan with the pearl buttons. I did not do it to make a point. It was a meeting, and those are my meeting clothes.

All right. I did it a little bit to make a point.

The board room was off the same paneled hallway as the bar. Danny saw me pass and put down his towel. I winked at him.

There were five men at a long table, and Tom standing by a screen with a map of the course on it. Steve Whitlock was at the far end, reading his phone. He glanced up when I came in, and his face did what faces do when they see someone familiar in the wrong place. He half smiled. He looked at the door behind me, I think for Dustin.