The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

Pam Whitlock did not look past me. I want that understood, because people have tried to be generous about it since. She looked right at me, at my face and then at my cardigan and then at my shoes, and she held out her empty glass.

“Another one of these,” she said. “Less ice this time. And tell them the lemon was dry.”

It was a tall glass with a paper napkin wrapped around the bottom, damp from her hand. I took it. I do not know what else a person does when something is put into her hand. Forty years of being handed things, I suppose. A baby, a wrench, a casserole dish, a clipboard.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She had already turned back to the two women she was standing with. One of them wore a white visor. The other was laughing at something on her phone. None of the three of them looked at me again.

I stood on the terrace of the Sangamon Ridge Country Club with a stranger’s lipstick on the rim of the glass in my hand, and I looked around for my son.

Dustin was nowhere. Ten minutes earlier Steve Whitlock had clapped him on the shoulder in the parking lot and said, “Come see the new simulator before the ladies get hold of you,” and walked him off down a hallway like a man leading a calf. Kristen had squeezed my arm and said she would be right back, she just needed to find her mother and the ladies’ room, in that order.

So she had gone looking for her mother, and I had found her first.

I should tell you how I came to be standing there.

Dustin is my only child. He was twenty-nine that spring, a lineman for the rural electric co-op, and he had been seeing Kristen Whitlock for eleven months. She was a pediatric nurse in Springfield. He met her when a storm took out a feeder line behind her apartment building and she brought coffee out to the crew at two in the morning in her scrubs and a rain jacket. He told me about it the next day, and he told it in the order a man tells a thing when he is already gone.

I had met her four times. I liked her every time. She ate what was put in front of her, and she asked my dog’s name before she asked anything else.

Her parents I had never met. They lived in a development on the west side of Springfield with a gate on it. Her father owned three car dealerships. Her mother, Dustin said, “did the club.”

“Did what at the club?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Mom. Ran it, kind of. Committees.”

The invitation came through Kristen, by text, with a little flower at the end. Saturday lunch, 12:30, the terrace if the weather held. Her mother would love to finally meet me.

“What do people wear to that?” I asked Dustin.

“Whatever you’d wear to church, I guess.”

So that is what I wore. My navy slacks. My good flats. The cream cardigan with the pearl buttons that Ray bought me at the Bergner’s in Springfield the Christmas before he passed, which I have worn nearly every Sunday for ten years and which has gone a little soft at the elbows. I had my hair done Friday at Brenda’s. I put on my mother’s watch.

I looked in the hall mirror before Dustin picked me up in his work truck, and I thought, well, Barb, you look like exactly what you are.