The Total My Mother in Law Handed Me

And then she laughed, one short breath of a laugh, at herself, and wiped under her eye with the side of her finger so she would not smear anything.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry I did it, and I am sorrier I did it here.”

“I know it,” I said. “It is done.”

It was, too. I felt it go out of me like a held breath.

That was when Owen, who had been patient longer than any one-year-old ought to have to be, leaned as far out of his high chair as the strap would let him and held his hand out to his grandmother. Open and shut, open and shut. It is what he does when he wants to be picked up. He had frosting on his sleeve and pretzel in his hair.

“Na,” he said.

He had been saying it for a week. We had not been sure who it was for.

Judy looked at him. Her whole face came apart and went back together different.

“Well, I cannot lift him,” she said. “Gene, hand me that child.”

Gene unbuckled him and set him in her lap. Owen got a fistful of her church blouse and put his frosted sleeve right against the front of it. She did not even look down.

“Brian,” she said, over the top of the baby’s head. “I will take your hundred and fifty. Because you are your father’s son and I will not get any peace otherwise.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And nothing else goes in the book. On the two of you.” She took a breath. “I do not know how to quit carrying it. I have had one in my purse since I was fifteen. I would not know what to do with my hands.”

I had been thinking about that already.

“Then do not quit,” I said. “Just count something else.”

She frowned at me.

“He is about to put his whole face in a cake for the first time in his life,” I said. “Somebody ought to write that down.”

Nobody moved for a second.

Then Gene said, “She has you there, Judy.”

Judy shifted Owen onto one knee. She opened her purse and took out the little red notebook, and she looked at it for a moment as if she were meeting it for the first time. Then she turned it over, so the back cover was the front, and opened it from that end. A clean page.

She clicked her pen.

“What is the date?” she said.

“The eleventh,” my mother told her.

Judy wrote. I watched the pen go, that same slanted country-school hand.

October 11. Owen, one year old. First cake.

“Light his candle, Brian,” she said, “before this child and I both give out.”

Brian lit the candle. We sang. Mom sings alto and Gene does not sing at all, he just moves his mouth, and Brian is flat, and it was the best I have ever heard that song. Owen stared at the flame with his mouth open. Brian blew it out for him, and I set the little cake I had made just for him on the tray of the high chair.

He looked at it. He looked at me. Then he put both hands in it up to the wrists.

Judy wrote that down, too. Both hands.

She had her one small piece of the big cake and she ate it slowly, with her eyes closed on the first bite. She had saved up for it. I had cut it from the corner, where the frosting is thickest.