Now her friendship circle was Nan, whose friendship was somewhat bought, if Bren allowed herself to really think about it, one rinse at a time; Tod at the doughnut shop, who probably wouldn’t notice if she disappeared, except that would mean he would have to press his cockamamie concoctions onto someone else; and the enthusiastic-wave-from-the-flower-bed neighbor two doors down, who wasn’t close enough for Bren to actually know her name. That was no circle of friends.
She knew people. People who knew people. Women who went on trips with other families. Women who lived for their GNOs. Women who bought one another birthday gifts and who probably celebrated Christmas at one another’s houses. Bren had always been jealous of those women. Soul-crushingly, mortifyingly, profoundly jealous. She wanted Sunday-dinner friends.
The envy pressed in on her, as it had done so many times before, making her shoulder itch. She scratched at it absently, a stab of guilt working its way through her. Nan was right—she really needed to talk to Gary about that. Before it was too late.
She got up and leaned over the counter, picking up her pen and righting it over the paper where she’d been making her lesson plans earlier. Or more like the paper where she should have been making lesson plans, but had gotten nowhere. She wrote down Southwestern Corn Casserole and Zippy Taco Dip.
There. That ought to please her student.
Her one student.
God, how humiliating that would be! Just one student?
She set the pen down and reached for her purse. She didn’t have friends, this was true. Nobody she could call in a favor on, beg for reciprocation, or help or anything much more than that flower-bed wave.
But, by God, she had family.
And family always owed one another.
CHAPTER SIX
Winter was not wasting any time showing up this year. It seemed to have swooped in on them all at once, Bren thought. Wasn’t it only two weeks ago that she’d been happily tooling around in her flannel jacket, still sporting sandals with her jeans? Wasn’t the neighborhood pool swarmed with kids the week before that?
Now the sky was more gray than blue, and the trees seemed to have dumped all of their leaves at once, their branches clicking and creaking against one another as the wind gusted through them.
Her mother’s street was decked out for fall, as it was always decked out for every seasonal occasion. While Bren’s neighborhood had definitely been a victim of post-middle-age fuck-its, her mother’s neighborhood was as progressive as a bunch of twentysomething parents of preschoolers. Never mind that the vast majority of them had lived in their houses for upward of forty years, and not a one of them even had a preschool-aged grandchild left. They were decorating fools. Really old, really dedicated decorating fools.
Her mother’s yard was tastefully done with three well-placed hay bales (which she must have had Bren’s brother, Mark, bring over) topped with a cute stack of pumpkins. She had anchored a wooden sign, painted in orange, yellow, and red, with the stenciled word THANK-FALL! near the front walk. Her yard had been raked (that was Bren’s nephew’s doing, for a pretty penny at that, Bren was sure—Money’s always one size fits all, amIright?), and she’d even hung a plastic turkey on the front door. It was cute.
Bren turned and glanced at the house across the street, which appeared to be not yet ready to let go of Halloween. The décor in that yard consisted of a garish-looking scarecrow, face drawn on in a terrifying grimace across a stuffed burlap sack, the arms covered with fake spiderwebs, one hand clutching a plastic amputated foot. A crow hung upside down from the general area of the scarecrow’s mouth, its head ripped mostly off and dangling. Also, curiously, there was a half-eaten Milky Way dangling from the scarecrow’s other hand.
As she was looking, suddenly the front door banged open, and out popped a familiar mass of tangled gray hair and rainbow clothing.
“Bren! Yoo-hoo!” the hair and clothing called.
Bren sighed. Of all the places her crazy aunt Cathy could have chosen to live, she’d chosen the house directly across from Bren’s perfectly, or at least mostly, sane mother’s house. Why her mother hadn’t moved out the very day Aunt Cathy moved in was beyond Bren. But then again, her mother seemed to have more patience with Aunt Cathy than did the rest of civilized society. She even seemed to sort of enjoy Aunt Cathy’s company, an anomaly Bren could only really guess had something to do with the post-WWII suffering that they had both endured as children.
“Hey, Aunt Cathy,” she said. “I’m not staying. Just a quick visit.”
Bren hated that she started every conversation with Aunt Cathy this way, specifically because starting conversations that way was nothing more than her hoping it would deter Aunt Cathy from making the slow, arduous trek down the long flight of steps that led from her front porch to her driveway.
But the old woman was too stubborn to save her arthritic knees from the torment of a stair climb. And, in turn, Bren’s torment of having to listen to her half-insane rants. What would it be this time? Puppy mills? Obamacare? The French? Those were Aunt Cathy’s top three.
“Can you believe that idiotic weatherman?” Oh yes. The idiotic weatherman. Top four. “He said it would be clear today. Clear! Ha! A lie if I’ve ever heard one. Clear is a snow globe. Clear is a window. Clear is not this . . .” Aunt Cathy paused midstep, gesturing wildly with both arms toward the sky. “This gray stuff!” Slowly she continued down the steps, which seemed to be growing, regenerating as she walked. It was like watching someone try to walk down the up escalator. “Soon there will be wind and snow, and what will the weatherman have to say for himself then?”
She had made it to the bottom of the steps at last, which meant Bren had to wait for the long pause for her aunt to readjust her knee-highs before the million-mile shuffle that would take her across the street.
“Well?” Aunt Cathy hollered, taking Bren off guard. She wasn’t used to being asked for input during one of Cathy’s rants. She wasn’t exactly prepared.
“Huh? Oh. I suppose he’ll be sorry then,” Bren said, but only because she thought it was the right thing to say. Surely Aunt Cathy would have heard nothing else.
“Damn straight,” Aunt Cathy said. “Someone ought to firebomb his car.”
“Well, that might be taking it a bit far,” Bren said, although she supposed that would make an interesting evening broadcast to watch during one of her solo cheese toast dinners.
At last Aunt Cathy was climbing up the curb to Bren’s mother’s house, grunting with the effort. God, Bren never wanted to get old. She wanted to stay this age forever. Actually, scratch that. She wanted to go back to twenty-five and stay that age forever. Back when her boobs were still something to look at and Gary was a man who still cared to look. Back when her kids begged her to put up the Christmas tree weeks too early. Back when she mattered.
But she especially didn’t want to get old enough to be adjusting her knee-highs while ranting about the weatherman and getting out of breath walking across the street.
Not that Aunt Cathy even paused when she reached Bren. She just kept going, kept ranting as she made her way right through the front door of Bren’s mom’s house.
Bren really needed to talk to her mom about leaving her front door unlocked. It was unsafe. Plus, how did she keep Cathy out?
It was one of the scariest things about losing her dad—the knowledge that now her mother, fragile and timid, would be alone. And the knowledge that Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags—amIright?—wouldn’t bother to so much as check to see if the woman was alive every now and then. If something horrible happened, Bren knew she would never forgive them or herself, so she’d been on high alert since the day they buried her father. It was sort of like being a new mother again, only worse, because it somehow felt easier to accidentally kill an old woman than a new baby. Or maybe that was just her fear talking.
She went in behind Aunt Cathy, noting immediatel
y how hot it was in the house. She’d talked to her mother about the heat a billion times, but the woman never listened. She liked it warm, she insisted. But there was warm and there was condensation-dripping-down-the-windows warm. There was sunscreen-and-calypso-music warm. There was run-around-the-house-nude warm. Bren made a pit stop at the thermostat. Her mother had it set at eighty-four. Who did that? Bren slid it down to seventy, wondering whether she could somehow open it up and bend the needle to point at eighty-four when it was actually at seventy. She bet she could. She felt deliciously deceitful, kind of like getting her back for all those Santa lies. She made a mental note to read up about it online.
She found her mother and aunt Cathy in the kitchen by the scent of the coffee, which was always fresh in her mother’s house, and the sound of Aunt Cathy’s ranting voice once again.
“. . . firebomb the whole news station . . . ,” Aunt Cathy was saying.
“Hi, Mom,” Bren announced, cutting Aunt Cathy off before she started counting casualties.
Her mother, Joan, sat, small and white, at the kitchen table, wrapped up in a sweater, her hands pressed against a full, steaming coffee mug, as if she were hayriding through the Antarctic. How was she not a melted grease slick by now?
“Hello, Brenda!” Joan said. “Come have some coffee with us. We were talking about the weather.”
“No, I can’t stay,” Bren said, waving off both the coffee and the conversation. Or at least she hoped. “I just wanted to come by to . . . invite you to something.” Maybe if she made it sound like something fun and exclusive, they would be excited about it.
“Oh, are you having a party?” Aunt Cathy asked, and when Bren didn’t answer immediately, she turned to Joan. “Is she having a party? I am so there. I want gin. Been craving gin for a week. I’ll bring the gin. Lots of it. Gin for everyone. Especially me.”
Actually, Bren could think of few things her aunt needed less than lots of gin, but she ignored and plowed on.
“It’s a class,” she said.
Her mother laughed. “I’m too old for school. I was never very good at it when I was young.”
“I hated school,” Aunt Cathy said. “Bunch of communists teaching in those schools anyway.”
“No, no,” Bren said, holding her palms out to stop the school rant before it started. “It’s not a class in a school. It’s a cooking class. In a kitchen. And I’m teaching it. And I’m not a communist,” she added.
The two older ladies glanced at each other and then burst out laughing.
“What?” Bren asked. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Joan said. “Nothing, honey. It’s just . . . you? Teaching a cooking class?”
Bren was stung. She’d had her mother over for dinner countless times. Hundreds, probably. Maybe thousands. Millions? Was it possible to make millions of dinners in a lifetime? She thought maybe it was, and maybe she had. It sure felt like she had. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“What’s so hilarious about that? I’m a great cook.”
“You are.” Her mother nodded. “But you’re not the most patient person in the world. What if someone in your class can’t cook?” She thumbed toward Aunt Cathy. A brilliant example of someone who couldn’t cook, in Bren’s estimation. Epically so. Aunt Cathy could do a lot of things—bitch, vent, rant, snark, snarl . . . dance—but she couldn’t so much as toast a Pop-Tart without nearly setting the house ablaze. In fact, when she’d moved into her new home, there had been some surreptitious discussions about having her oven secretly disabled so she wouldn’t accidentally burn down the whole neighborhood while trying to hard-boil an egg.
Once, Aunt Cathy burned a salad. It was Fryer family lore with long roots, and although Aunt Cathy swore on a stack of Bibles it never happened, there were a dozen Fryers who would swear on two stacks that it had.
But Bren thought about it. Thought about how she blurted out that bit about how far away Kelsey was to that woman at the stoplight the day she got the job at the Kitchen Classroom. Her mother had a point. She wasn’t the most patient person in the world. And she only seemed to get worse as she got older. And if there was a time of year that her already-thin patience wore down to nothing, it was the holiday season. All those crowds and the noise and the shopping and the pressure. She wondered why on earth she felt blue about missing it. Shouldn’t she be rejoicing that she didn’t have to be part of that nonsense this year?
Bren schlepped over to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup, then slunk to the kitchen table, where the sugar and cream were. Her mother pushed them toward her without a word. Like the rest of her mother’s kitchen, the table could be described as “retro diner.” White Formica top, red vinyl chairs, full sugar bowl as a centerpiece. But the truth was, it was just plain retro. Bren’s mother could make just about anything last forever.
“Well, of course we’re kidding,” her mother said, patting Bren’s hand. “You will do great, and if you want us to be there, we will be there, Brenda.”
“With gin,” Aunt Cathy added.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Bren said. She stirred her coffee, laid the spoon on a napkin just the way her mother always did, but instead of taking a sip, leaned forward on her elbows, resting her forehead in the palms of her hands. “I swear I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. Did you know I was getting ready to look up a recipe for figgy pudding? Figgy pudding, for Christ’s sake. What, is it 1852? Who the hell eats figgy pudding anymore?”
“I would eat figgy pudding,” Aunt Cathy said. “Is it made out of figs, or is it one of those things that sounds like a reasonable food and then when you eat it you find out it’s made out of intestines and eyeballs and rotted stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Bren moaned into the cavern of her arms. “I never looked up the recipe because I got sidetracked thinking about goose.”
“We used to eat goose on Uncle Wyatt’s farm,” Joan said. “Remember that, Catherine? It was supposed to be a treat, but it always tasted so dark and greasy to me. Our brothers got most of it.”
Aunt Cathy leveled her gaze at Joan, silently and for so long, Bren peeked up over her arm at her.
“I’ve never had goose,” Aunt Cathy said.
“Yes, you have. You don’t remember all those weekends at Uncle Wyatt’s house? The goose, the cauliflower with cheese sauce, the angel food cakes?”
Aunt Cathy shook her head adamantly. “Who is Uncle Wyatt?”
“Are you kidding me? He was Daddy’s brother. Lived out in the country. How can you not remember him, Cathy?”
“I swear, you get more demented every day, Joan,” Aunt Cathy said, and then they were off, talking over each other, arguing over the uncle who may or may not have ever existed. In Cathy’s favor, Bren had never heard of an Uncle Wyatt, either. In Joan’s favor, Cathy didn’t remember most of her childhood, and seemed to have re-created one based mostly on old movies and the occasional Hallmark commercial. In Bren’s best guess, Cathy lost her childhood memories right around the time Woodstock was ringing out with warnings not to take the brown acid. Coincidence? Probably not.
On and on they went, Bren following them as if following a particularly muddled and slightly schizophrenic tennis match while sipping her coffee. Finally, when she’d reached the bottom of the cup, and the two women had taken a long and winding road to the subject of unremembered childhood pets, she cleared her throat.
“You guys are coming to Thanksgiving, right?”
Joan blinked at her. “Well, why wouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know,” Bren said, using her finger to pick up a few random sugar crystals. “Maybe because you’re abandoning me on Christmas. Your only daughter. Your newly empty-nested only daughter.”
“For the get-over-it files,” Aunt Cathy said, and then elbowed Joan. “You hear that? Pretty good, huh? I heard some kid say it on Nickelodeon.”
But
Joan ignored her. “Brenda, don’t take it so personally. We’ve wanted to take this trip forever, and neither of us is getting any younger. If we don’t do it now, it might be too late.”
“And mama needs to have cheap crab legs with one of them Vegas strippers,” Aunt Cathy said. “You can’t deprive an old lady of the essentials. Seafood.” She held out one cupped hand, and then held out the other. “And buns.”
“Gary is taking me to a cafeteria for Christmas Eve dinner,” Bren said. “A cafeteria. So it feels pretty personal, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Those places have good rolls,” Aunt Cathy said.
“It’s just this once,” Joan said. “Next year we’ll all be together. Look at it like a long-awaited break. Let someone else do everything for you for a change.”
“Like a stripper!” Aunt Cathy said.
“You’re not getting a stripper,” Joan said.
“Bet me.”
And they were off again.
No matter what Bren could or couldn’t do in the classroom, it couldn’t be any worse than enduring an entire holiday season of this.
“So I’ll see you both on Thursday?” she asked, standing up and taking her cup to the sink.
“Where?” Aunt Cathy asked.
“What’s Thursday?” Joan said at the same time.
Bren resisted the urge to scream. “My cooking class.”
The Hundred Gifts Page 5