The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8
Counting the Chairs
I stood there at the sink and did the math a woman does when the number is already too big and she keeps adding anyway, hoping somehow it will come out smaller the third time through.
Cory’s mother Linda and her husband Ray, that was two. Aunt Deb and Uncle Roy, that made four. The three cousins, their spouses, their kids, and you could not even get a clean count on the kids because the little ones travel in a clump and you lose track at a family picnic, let alone in your head over a sink.
By the time I got to Cory’s grandmother Marge, who was eighty one and did not do stairs, I was at twenty six. Twenty six people in a house that seats six at the table if two of them are children and nobody minds an elbow in the ribs.
I was seven months pregnant. I was sleeping with a pillow between my knees and getting up twice a night to pee, and that very morning the doctor had looked at my ankles and told me to stay off my feet in the afternoons, drink more water, and quit carrying the laundry basket up the stairs.
I looked at my stairs. I looked at my one full bath with the shower that took four minutes to run warm. I looked at the oven that only heated true on the left side, the oven I had been fighting since October, and I tried to picture a turkey and nine side dishes and twenty six people’s worth of wet towels and the Christmas morning line for that half bath that ran.
I tried to picture where they would even sleep. Air mattresses wall to wall in the living room. Cousins’ kids on the floor by the tree. Marge, eighty one, with her bad hip, where exactly. Not up my stairs. On my couch for five nights, is where, while the young ones took the beds, because that is how it always shakes out and the oldest one pays for it.
The garage door rumbled up. Cory came in rubbing his hands together, cold pink on his cheeks, grinning about nothing in particular the way he does, a good natured man who had just set a bomb down on my kitchen counter and could not hear it ticking.
“Tires were low on the back passenger,” he said. “You okay? You’ve gone white as the sink.”
I picked up his phone and held it out to him across the counter. “You want to tell me about Christmas.”