The Picture Over My Fireplace

The first time I knew it had gone further than cabinets was the second week of October.

My charge nurse, Tammy, was retiring after thirty-one years, and I had volunteered to pick up the cake. I ordered it from Sandra’s store on purpose, partly because it was the best bakery in town and partly because I thought it might be a nice thing, a little bridge.

Sandra was not working the counter that afternoon. A younger woman with a name tag that said Deb was. She brought the cake out, white frosting with blue roses, and when I said the order was under Marr, her face lit up.

“Oh, you’re Kelsey! You’re Ryan’s Kelsey,” she said. “Sandy talks about you two all the time. You must just love the house he bought you.”

I stood there holding a sheet cake for forty nurses.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“The brick one on the east side,” Deb said. “With the fireplace. Sandy showed us pictures. She says he got a real steal on it. She’s so proud of him. She says she’s doing Christmas there this year, the whole family.”

I said something. I think I said “That’s nice.” I paid for the cake. I carried it out to my car and set it on the passenger seat and sat there with the engine running for a long time.

The picture Sandra had shown them was my house. I knew which one, too. She had taken it from the street the first time she came over, standing on the sidewalk in almost the exact spot where Kim had taken mine.

I want to be honest about what went through my head in that parking lot, because it was not all good.

The first thing I wanted to do was walk back in and ask Deb to go get Sandra from the back, and stand there at the bakery counter and say, very calmly, “Sandra, I’d like you to tell your coworkers who bought my house.”

I could see it. I could see her face. I could see Deb’s face. For about ten seconds, it felt wonderful.

Then I thought about what would happen after. Sandra would have to go back to that counter the next morning and every morning after, with every person in that department knowing she had been corrected by her son’s girlfriend in front of the doughnut case.

She would never forgive me. And I would never really blame her. Correcting a woman’s bragging at her own job does not fix anything. It only starts a war, and the war would have been fought on Ryan.

I did not call her, either. I knew exactly how that call would go. She would laugh and say Deb must have misunderstood, and I would be the girlfriend who called his mother at work to pick a fight about a cake.

So I drove the cake to the hospital, and Tammy cried when she saw the blue roses, because blue was her favorite, and I did not say a word about any of it until I got home the next morning.

Ryan was making eggs when I came in at quarter to eight, still in my scrubs. I sat down at the table and told him the whole thing, word for word, including the steal and the Christmas.

He put the spatula down and turned off the burner.

“She said I bought it,” he said.

“She said you bought it for me. Like a present.”