The Names on the Registry List

The phone call

The room sat there. Forty women and thirty-one opened gifts and a sheet cake with pale green frosting that nobody had cut past the corner.

I looked at the rocker box. And I remembered something I had promised.

When Ida ordered the rocker in September, she had called me herself. She did not trust the internet to tell me it was coming.

She said, “Kristen, I want you to call me when you open that chair, because I am eighty-six and I would like to hear a young woman be happy about something.”

So I picked up my phone and called her.

I put it on speaker. I think I wanted the room to hear somebody be kind.

It rang four times, and I almost hung up, and then that voice came on, high and dry and Oklahoma all the way through.

“Is this my chair?” Ida said.

“It’s your chair,” I said. “Aunt Ida, it’s beautiful. I haven’t got it out of the box yet, but I can see the arms, and they’re solid oak, and I’m going to sit in it every night. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Well, good,” Ida said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. How many people have you got there? It sounds like a bus station.”

“About forty,” I said. “My mom’s whole side and half of Concordia.”

There was a pause on the line. Then Ida said, “Is Patty there?”

The room went still all over again.

“She’s in the kitchen,” I said.

“Take me to her,” Ida said. “Off the speaker, please. I’d like to talk to Patty.”

The kitchen

I took the phone off speaker and pushed myself up out of the armchair, which at seven months takes a while, and walked through the doorway past my mother.

Mom touched my arm as I went by. She did not say anything.

Patty was at the sink with both hands on the edge of the counter, looking out the window at my dad’s machine shed. The water was still running.

“Patty,” I said. “It’s Ida. She wants to talk to you.”

She shook her head. I held the phone out anyway. After a second she turned the water off and dried her hands on her slacks and took it.

“Hello, Ida,” she said.

I stood close enough to hear most of it. Ida does not have a quiet voice.

“Patricia,” Ida said. “Kristen tells me the chair got there.”

“It got there,” Patty said.

“I hear you’ve been having a hard year.”

Patty’s chin went. She put her free hand over her mouth.

“Now you listen to me,” Ida said. “I have been a Lowe since 1958, and I married into it the same as you did. Rick leaving doesn’t take you off my Christmas card list. You hear me? You are that baby’s grandmother. Nobody in this family was keeping score on what you spent. Nobody but you.”

Patty was crying too hard to answer.

“You should have called me,” Ida said. “I’d have sent you a high chair and nobody’d have known the difference.”

“I know,” Patty said. “I know it. I’m sorry, Ida.”

“Don’t be sorry to me. I got my phone call. Go be sorry to that girl, and then go eat some cake. You sound like you haven’t eaten since Tuesday.”

Patty laughed in the middle of crying, one wet, hiccupping laugh. Then she said goodbye and handed me my phone.