The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8

The Thing Mothers Say

I called his mother that night, after Cory went to bed thinking it was all handled because he had said the words “I’ll help.”

I want to be fair to Linda. She is not a bad woman. She raised three boys mostly on her own after her first husband left, and she keeps a spotless house and she has never once said a sharp word to my face. But she comes out of the kind of family where the women absorb things, where a daughter in law is a set of helping hands that happened to arrive attached to the son, and she truly did not know she was asking anything hard of me.

“Allyson, honey,” she said, warm as a pie on a sill. “I am just so glad Cory’s finally stepping up to host. I told him, it’s good practice for you. You’re about to have a houseful of your own, you may as well learn to swing it.”

Good practice. There it was, the whole thing, said out loud and kindly.

“Linda, I’m seven months along. The doctor has me off my feet in the afternoons and off the stairs with the laundry.”

“Oh, you young girls,” she said, and she laughed, not mean, just dead certain. “I hosted Thanksgiving for thirty the year I was carrying Cory. Big as a barn and up at dawn basting. You just keep moving, hon. It’s good for the baby.”

I did not argue with her. You cannot argue a person out of a thing they survived forty years ago and remember as a trophy. She had carried it, so I could carry it, and the carrying had been her love, the proof of it. I understood her better than she knew. I just was not going to do it.

“We’ll make it work,” I said, which is what you say, and I hung up and sat in my dark living room with just the tree lights on and both hands resting on the baby and I thought it all the way through.

People ask me why I did not just make Cory call every last one of them back and cancel the whole thing. I thought about that for about four minutes.

Here is the trouble with canceling. If I made Cory cancel, I became the wife who canceled Christmas. His mother would have forgiven me out loud and remembered it for the rest of her natural life. The cousins would have had a thing to say in that group text. And Cory, who meant no harm in the world, would have spent the whole season apologizing to his family for me, instead of understanding for himself what he had actually gone and done.

I was not going to spend my last Christmas before the baby playing the villain in his family’s story. And I was not going to beg my own husband to undo a promise just so his wife could put her feet up. Begging teaches a man that your rest is a favor he grants, something you ask for nicely and he decides. I was not interested in teaching him that.

So I did not cancel one single thing. His family was invited. They were coming the 22nd through the 27th, pool floaties and foil pans and all. I simply was not going to be the one on her feet for five straight days while they did it.