Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
Then he went back out for the box of June’s things and Amy pulled in behind him with the baby asleep in her car seat.
That night we had supper at Linda’s table, all six of us. I made a big pan of goulash in her kitchen with groceries I had brought from our house.
Linda sat at the end where Nate’s dad used to sit and ate maybe four bites.
Owen spilled his milk. Biscuit begged under the table and got caught. Linda said, “We don’t feed dogs from the table in this house,” and Owen said, “Sorry, Grandma,” and fed Biscuit a noodle anyway.
After supper I washed every dish and dried them and put them back where they went.
I have helped Linda with eleven Thanksgivings. I know the gravy boat goes on the top shelf and the good knives go blade down.
When I went to bed that night on the twin mattress on the sewing room floor, with Hailey on the other twin mattress beside me and Owen on his little one in the corner and June in the portable crib and Nate on the spare bed, I heard Linda in the kitchen.
She was standing at the sink running water over nothing. I could tell, because I could hear the water and nothing else.
No dishes. No clinking. Just the water running and running, and then shutting off.
The first three days were the hardest.
Linda’s house is quiet. I don’t think there had been real noise in it since Nate’s father passed two winters before.
A clock ticking. The furnace. The weather radio on the refrigerator turned down low.
We brought five people and a beagle into it. The baby cried at three in the morning and again at five. Owen woke up at six singing. Hailey couldn’t find her other boot and searched the whole house for it, calling, “Has anybody seen my boot,” in every room.
Biscuit discovered that the floral couch was the softest thing in Kansas and could not be convinced otherwise.
Every time I turned around she was up there, nose tucked under her tail, looking at me with those eyes like she was sorry and also not sorry at all.
On the second morning Owen dropped a whole bowl of Cheerios on the living room carpet. Not some of it.
All of it, milk and all, right in front of the floral couch. He stood there looking at it with his mouth open.
I was on my knees with a towel before Linda got out of the hall.
I got the cereal up and I blotted the milk and I got the carpet shampoo out from under her sink where I knew it would be.
Linda stood in the doorway in her robe and watched me scrub. She didn’t say anything.
But she went and got the other towel, the old one she keeps for the dog days, and she got down on her knees beside me and blotted next to me until it was done.
“Grandma,” Owen said, “I’m sorry I spilled your carpet.”
“It’s all right,” she said, and her voice did something strange in the middle of the word all. “It’s only carpet.”
I drove the kids to school and daycare every morning from Linda’s house. It was four more minutes than from ours. Hailey to the elementary, Owen and June with me to work.
Nate left at six for the elevator and came back to Linda’s at night instead of ours, and he never once complained about it.