The Dutch House(86)
Maeve and our mother were making chicken and dumplings together on a late autumn Friday. Our mother, as it turned out, was the one who knew how to cook. The kitchen was tight and warm and they moved around each other with efficiency. “You should stay,” my mother said when I lifted the lid of the Dutch oven, dipping my face into the billowing steam.
I shook my head. “Kevin has a game. I should have been in the car twenty minutes ago.”
Maeve wiped her floury hands on the dishtowel she had tied around her waist. “Come outside for a minute. I want to ask you about the gutter before you go.”
She put on her red wool mackinaw at the door, what she always referred to as her barn coat, even though I doubted she had ever been in a barn. We trudged out into the cold late afternoon light, the red and gold leaves that I would be called upon to rake on my next visit piling around our feet. We stood at the corner of the house to see the place where the gutter was starting to pull away from the roof.
“So when is it over?” Maeve asked, looking up.
I thought she was talking about the roof and so looked up myself. “When is what over?”
“The petulance, the punishment.” Maeve dug her hands into her coat pockets. “I know this has been hard for you but I’m kind of sick of thinking about it that way if you want to know the truth—that my heart attack was hard for you. That our mother coming back was hard for you.”
I was surprised, and then just as quickly defensive. I had turned my life over to Maeve these past six months, and through considerable effort I’d kept my feelings about our mother to myself. If anything, I’d gotten nicer. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Well, I’m fine.”
It seemed impossible that we hadn’t talked about this before, Maeve and I who talked about everything. But we were never alone anymore. Our chipper mother forever found the spot between us and settled in, reducing our conversation to soup recipes and nostalgic reminiscences of poverty. “You’re fine with all of it?”
Maeve looked down the street. Since I hadn’t realized we were coming outside to discuss the circumstances of our lives, I hadn’t thought to put on my coat and now I was cold. “There is a finite amount of time,” Maeve said. “Maybe I understand that better now. I’ve wanted my mother back since I was ten years old, and now she’s here. I can use the time I’ve got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.”
“Those are the two choices?” I wished we could get in the car and drive over to the Dutch House, just sit by ourselves for a minute even though we didn’t do that anymore.
Maeve looked back at the gutter and nodded. “Pretty much.”
Other than Mr. Otterson’s insight and Maeve’s recovery, I couldn’t imagine feeling lucky where any of this was concerned. Our mother’s gain had been my decisive loss. “Does she even know what happened to us after she left? Have you told her about Andrea, about how she threw us out?”
“Jesus, of course she knows about Andrea. Do you think we’ve been playing cards all summer? I’ve told her everything that’s happened, and I know what happened to her, too. It’s amazing what you can find out about a person if you’re interested. All these conversations were open to you, by the way. Don’t think you’ve been excluded. Every time she opens her mouth you find a reason to leave the room.”
“I’m not the one she’s interested in.”
Maeve shook her head. “Grow up.”
It seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say to a forty-five-year-old that I started to laugh and then caught myself. It had been a long time since we’d had something to fight about. “Okay, if you know so much about her, tell me why she left. And don’t say she didn’t like the wallpaper.”
“She wanted—” Maeve stopped, exhaled, her frozen breath making me think of smoke. “She wanted to help people.”
“People other than her family.”
“She made a mistake. Can’t you understand that? She’s covered up in shame. That’s why she never got in touch with us, you know, when she came back from India. She was afraid we’d treat her pretty much the way you’ve treated her. It’s her belief that your cruelty is what she deserves.”
“I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it is what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there.
“Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.”