The Maid Out Back Was My Mother
At a quarter to one, Jessica came to the door one more time. She had redone her lipstick.
“Last chance,” she said to me. She was not smiling now. “Go upstairs. Please. You are going to humiliate this family in front of the only people in this town who matter to Trent’s future.”
“I’m not going to do anything, Jess,” I said. “I’m going to stand next to Mom.”
“And say what?”
“That depends on what gets said to her.”
She looked at me with real hatred then, quick and bright, the first honest thing I had seen on her face all day. Then the doorbell rang, and it was gone, and she turned and went to answer it in her cream colored dress.
They came in twos, laughing, the men in quarter zips and the women in bright fall jackets, carrying bottles of wine with ribbons on the necks. Twenty four people, and Trent shook every hand.
My mother went to the buffet table and began lighting the little burners under the warming dishes. I went with her. I had on the same jeans and the same wrinkled shirt, damp at the knees.
Nobody looked at either of us. I want to be fair about that, because most of those people turned out to be decent. They did not look at us because they had been told who we were. You do not study the help at a party. You look past them, pleasantly.
I had never been on that side of it before. My mother had been on that side of it for fifty years.
“Trent, this view,” a woman said.
“We like it,” Trent said. “We got lucky with the lot.”
“How long have you two been in the house now?”
“Going on three years,” Jessica said. “We just fell in love with it.”
My mother’s hand paused on the lighter. Then it went on to the next burner.
I carried out the egg casserole. My mother carried out the biscuits. A man with a gray mustache said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and held the door for her, and she nodded at him without raising her eyes.
They sat. Trent stood up at the head table and tapped a glass, and said how glad he and Jessica were to open their home, and how much this league had meant to them, and how he hoped to serve the club in a bigger way in the coming year.
Their home. He said it three times. I counted.
My mother stood beside me against the wall of the house with her hands folded in front of her. I could feel her arm against mine, and I could feel that she was shaking, just slightly, like a wire with a current in it.
“You all right?” I whispered.
“I’m listening,” she said.
It was maybe ten minutes later that it happened.
A woman at the nearest table, sixty or so, silver bob, a kind round face, turned in her gold chair and looked around until her eyes landed on my mother. She held up an empty glass and gave it a friendly little shake.
“Hon,” she called, “would you be a dear and fetch some more ice? This bucket’s gone to water.”
My mother started forward. Fifty years of habit moved her feet before her mind had any say.