A week and a half before my dad married my mother’s little sister, I went down on the ice with three cartons of her candleholders in my arms.
She drove to the hospital to tell me the reception was STILL MINE to run.
My mom had been gone thirteen months.
Tricia had her toothbrush in our upstairs bathroom before the first anniversary.
At first she brought casseroles and sat with me on the back step.
Then she stopped bothering.
“You’re as useless as she was,” she said to me in the laundry room in October.
She only said things like that when Dad was out in the garage.
I told him once.
He looked at me like I was the one who needed talking to.
The candleholders were for the head table.
She’d had them shipped to the UPS store on Second Street because she didn’t trust our mailman.
It’s a quarter mile. The sidewalks were glazed.
My boot went out, and I was on my back looking at a white sky with glass breaking somewhere by my ear.
After that, nothing.
I woke up at St. Francis with plaster from my knuckles to my elbow and my right leg cast to the toes.
Tricia stood at the foot of the bed in her good coat.
“DON’T YOU DARE use this to get out of it,” she said.
“The lodge. The cake. Eighty-six invitations. That’s all still on you.”
Dad came in later and told me to watch where I was walking.
Nobody helped me up the stairs when we got back.
I went up backwards on my seat, one step at a time, dragging the crutch.
Dad found my old baby monitor in the hall closet and plugged the other half in by the kitchen phone.
“Just holler,” he said.
I hollered twice that week.
The second time I heard the TV go up.
Grandma called from Salina at nine-thirty every night.
She’d done it since Grandpa died. She still kept his coffee can of screws on top of her dryer.
“Is that my girl?” she said that night.
I made it about four words.
Then it all came out. The laundry room. The ice. A whole reception run from a bed.
She let me go until I ran dry.
“You do every single thing they ask, honey,” she said.
“And when I get up there, I’m bringing them a party they’ll talk about for years.”
I asked what that meant.
“You’ll see,” she said, and asked what I’d had for supper.
So I did every single thing.
I booked the Elks lodge from my bed.
I called down that list one name at a time.
I ordered two tiers instead of her three, because the lodge’s cake table was too small.
Our neighbor drove me to get Tricia’s dress, and I held it across my lap the whole way.
The party was set for four on Friday.
At ten to three the doorbell went.
I couldn’t do stairs without somebody below me.
Tricia was in the hall bathroom pinning her hair.
“Could you get the door?” I said.
She came and stood in my doorway with half her curls up.
“I don’t know why I keep feeding you,” she said.
Then she went down.
The monitor on my nightstand picked up everything.
The deadbolt. The storm door.
Grandma, bright as anything.
“Hi, sweetheart. I came for the party.”
Then a THUD THAT SHOOK THE MONITOR, like something heavy set down flat on the entry tile.
Dad’s chair scraped in the kitchen.
“Mom. What is that? WHY TODAY?”
The Tile by the Front Door
I did the first five steps on my seat anyway, cast leg out in front of me, until I could see the front door.
It was Grandpa Vern’s bingo speaker.
A gray cabinet speaker about the size of a dorm fridge, with a handle on each side and a black microphone coiled on top like a garden hose. Grandma had carried it up our walk by herself and let go of it the second she cleared the storm door.
The tile under it had a crack running from one corner to the other.
She stood over it in her church coat, breathing hard, her purse still hooked on her elbow.
Tricia was holding the door open with her hip. She hadn’t moved.
Dad came around the corner from the kitchen with a dish towel in his hand.
“Mom,” he said. “What is that?”
“You know what it is, Greg. It’s your father’s.”
“Why is it in my front hall?”
“Because I’ve got a toast to give,” Grandma said. “And I hear that lodge microphone cuts out every third word.”
Then she looked up the stairs and saw me.
She had heard all of it on the phone. She had not seen it. The plaster to my elbow. The leg stuck out over the edge of the step. The crutch I’d dragged down behind me, hooked over the rail.
She put a hand flat on the wallpaper.
“Oh, honey,” she said.
Tricia let the storm door go. It hissed shut behind her.
“Joyce, nobody asked for a toast.”
“Nobody had to.”
“It’s my reception.”
“And that’s my granddaughter sitting on the stairs in two casts,” Grandma said. “Which one of you carried her up?”
Dad looked at the dish towel.
Tricia looked at me.
She had a way of smiling at me when Dad was in the room. Her mouth did it and nothing else did.
“She gets around,” Tricia said. “She’s more capable than she lets on.”
Grandma didn’t answer that.
She came up the stairs one at a time, holding the rail, and sat down on the step below mine so her knee was against my good foot. She’s seventy-four. She sat down like it cost her something.
She smelled like the inside of her Buick. Coffee and the pink wintergreen mints she keeps in the cup holder.
“We’ll get you dressed,” she said to me.
Dad cleared his throat.
“Mom, that thing can’t come to the lodge. They’ve got a system.”
“Kayla says it cuts out.”
The hall got quiet. The furnace kicked on somewhere under us.
Tricia turned her head and looked up at me over Grandma’s shoulder.
“How would Kayla know what the lodge mic does?”
“I booked it,” I said. “The manager told me.”
She kept looking.
“What else have you been telling her?”
A Monitor on the Nightstand
My mom bought that monitor before I was born.
It’s white plastic that has gone the color of old piano keys. It comes in two halves: the one that listens, and the one you carry around. The one you carry has a row of five little lights down the front that climb when there’s noise, and a button on the side you hold down to talk back.
Dad dug it out the night we got home from St. Francis.
He set the listening half on the kitchen counter by the phone. He put the other half on my nightstand and showed me the button like I was six.
The idea was that I’d hold the button and call down.
Nobody thought about the rest of the time. The kitchen half never stopped listening.
The first couple of nights it was nothing. The dishwasher. Dad’s cough. The weather on the little TV on top of the fridge.
On the fourth night Dad went out to the garage after supper to fight with the snowblower. Tricia sat down at the kitchen table and called her friend Deb in Kearney.
The lights on my nightstand climbed to three and stayed there.
I wasn’t trying to listen. I was lying on my back with a pillow under my cast leg and nowhere to go.
Tricia talked about the flowers first. Then the DJ. Then whether the Elks would let her bring her own champagne.
Then Deb asked her something I couldn’t make out, and Tricia laughed.
“Once the ring’s on, Greg does what I tell him. He always has. He just didn’t know it was me.”
A pause.
“April. Deb, your cousin already walked through it. He says it’ll go quick. Three bedrooms on that street.”
Another pause.
“The girl? She’s twenty. She can rent something. Shannon’s kid can go be useless on her own dime.”
I picked my phone up off the quilt.
I opened the voice memo app, held the phone flat against the little speaker grille on the monitor, and pushed the red button.
I got a minute and forty-eight seconds.
Deb again. The DJ again. Something about a ham. Tricia saying she’d paint my mom’s sewing room gray before the listing photos, because gray sells.
Then the garage door rattled. The lights dropped to one, and she was asking Dad if he wanted pie.
I didn’t send it to anybody.
I didn’t tell Grandma that night, or the next, when she called at nine-thirty. I told her about the cake, and how the lodge’s cake table was smaller than Tricia thought. I told her the lodge manager, a man named Merle with a hearing aid, had warned me their cordless mic cut out if you stood more than a few feet from the wall.
Something else I didn’t tell her came from the ER nurse. She had told me herself, while she was fixing the tape on my arm: before Tricia came in to see me, she’d stopped at the desk to ask whether the candleholders made it.
The recording sat on my phone between a picture of my cast and a picture of the dress.
Two days before the party, Tricia came up with the programs.
She’d had them printed at the copy place on Third. Cream card stock, a little bow in the corner.
She set one on my quilt and tapped a line with her nail.
6:15. Toast. Kayla Brandt, niece of the bride.
“Short,” she said. “People need to see we’re a family.”
Table Six at the Elks
“Just the cake,” I said.
Tricia held my eyes a second longer. Then she smiled for Dad.
“Greg. The speaker.”
Dad rubbed the back of his neck, which is what he does right before he gives in.
“Mom, it’s not coming. They’ve got a sound system. It’s handled.”
Grandma looked at him for a long time.
“Fine,” she said.
She went back down, and she and Dad picked up Vern’s speaker by the handles and carried it out between them, crabwise down the icy walk. I watched through the storm door glass. She popped the trunk. It went in.
Tricia waited until the storm door shut behind them.
Then she came up the stairs and crouched on the step above me, so the hem of her robe brushed my cast.
“Listen to me,” she said. Quiet and even. “If that old woman says one word tonight that isn’t congratulations, you’re out of that house before the snow melts.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Not April. Before.”
She went back up to finish her hair.
I sat there with my phone in my sweatshirt pocket until Grandma came back in and zipped me into a black dress that went on over the casts. She put her own gray cardigan over the sling so the back gap wouldn’t show.
The ceremony was at four in the big room at the Elks, under the elk head and the flags.
I sat in the front row on the aisle with my cast leg up on a second chair, because that was the only way it fit. Grandma sat beside me holding my crutch like a flagpole.
Dad cried a little during the vows. Tricia didn’t.
Dinner was ham, funeral potatoes, and the green beans with the fried onions on top.
At table six it was me, Grandma, Deb and her husband Larry, and two of Tricia’s cousins from Hastings I’d only met at my mom’s funeral.
Deb was on her second glass of pink wine before the salads were cleared.
She leaned across Grandma to pat my good hand.
“Tricia says you’re getting your own place in the spring,” she said. “Good for you, sweetie. You’ll love having your own space.”
Grandma’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Is that so,” Grandma said.
“Oh, she’s so excited for you,” Deb said.
I looked at the head table. Dad was laughing at something Tricia’s brother had said. He hadn’t heard a word.
Then I looked at table four.
Rick Olander was cutting his ham into squares. He had on a sport coat with the vent still stitched shut from the store.
I knew his name because I had called him myself. He was on Tricia’s list, near the bottom, with a Kearney number. He’d said congratulations, he wouldn’t miss it, and did I want him to bring anything.
Deb followed my eyes.
“That’s my cousin,” she said. “The realtor. Isn’t he a doll?”
At a quarter to six, Merle tapped the lodge microphone at the head table. It cut out on the second tap and came back as a squeal that made the Hastings cousins cover their ears.
Somebody at the bar laughed.
Grandma set her napkin beside her plate.
“Excuse me,” she said. She went out the side door to the parking lot in her church shoes.
She came back with Larry. They had Vern’s speaker between them.
Dad half stood up at the head table. Tricia put her hand on his arm and he sat back down. You don’t make a scene at your own reception.
Grandma had Merle plug the lodge mic into the back of the speaker. She knew which hole. She had watched Vern do it every Friday at St. Mary’s in Salina for twenty-two years.
“Testing,” Merle said, and the whole hall heard him, clean.
Grandma sat back down beside me, breathing hard again.
“I was going to tell eighty-six people what she said to you in that laundry room,” she said.
I put my good hand on her wrist.
“It’s my toast, Grandma. Let me do it.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Then you stand up as straight as those casts let you, honey.”
6:15 on the Program
Dad’s friend from the co-op went first.
He told the snowblower story, the one where Dad blew a whole driveway of snow onto the neighbor’s car. People laughed where they were supposed to.
Then Merle read off his card.
“Kayla Brandt. Niece of the bride.”
It took me a while to get up. Grandma handed me the crutch and kept her hand on my back until I had my balance. Then she let go.
The walk went along the edge of the dance floor, past table four.
Rick Olander smiled at me. I didn’t smile back.
Merle bent the mic stand up to my height. I leaned the crutch against the head table, right beside Tricia’s elbow.
She smiled out at the room.
“Hi,” I said.
Vern’s speaker threw my voice all the way to the back wall and the bar. It startled me a little. It startled a couple of other people too.
“A lot of you know me,” I said. “I’m the one in the casts.”
Some of them laughed.
“My mom would have loved tonight. She’d have cried through the vows and told everybody it was the flowers.”
One of the Hastings cousins wiped under her eye with a knuckle.
“Aunt Tricia asked me to keep this short,” I said. “So I’m going to let her say it.”
I took my phone out of the cardigan pocket, held it up to the microphone, and pressed play.
The first thing out of the speaker was our kitchen. The fridge humming, loud as a truck.
Then Tricia.
“Once the ring’s on, Greg does what I tell him.”
It came out of Vern’s speaker the same size as a bingo number.
Tricia’s hand went flat on the tablecloth.
“April. Deb, your cousin already walked through it.”
At table four, Rick Olander set his fork on his plate very carefully, like it might go off.
“She’s twenty. She can rent something.”
Dad turned in his chair and looked at Tricia. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me.
“Shannon’s kid can go be useless on her own dime.”
One of the Hastings cousins said “Trish” out loud, just the once.
I let it run. All of it. The ham. The DJ. My mom’s sewing room going gray because gray sells.
A minute and forty-eight seconds is a long time in a room that size.
Tricia didn’t get up, and she didn’t reach for the phone. I think she knew every person in that hall was waiting to see if she would.
When it ended, I put the phone back in the cardigan and picked up my crutch.
“Congratulations,” I said.
The only sound in the whole Elks hall was the ice machine dropping a load behind the bar.
The Coat Room
I made it as far as the coat room off the lobby before she caught up with me.
Grandma had gone for her keys. I was trying to get my winter coat off its hanger with one hand, and the hanger kept swinging away.
Tricia came in and yanked the folding door shut behind her so hard it bounced back open.
“Do you have any idea what you just did?”
I got the coat halfway off the hanger.
“That was a private phone call. In my own kitchen. You lay up there and you spied on me with a baby toy, like some kind of sneak. Do you know how that looks? Do you know how you look?”
She was breathing through her nose.
“I gave up my apartment for that house. I gave up my job at the clinic in Kearney. I have cooked for your father every single night since the funeral. I’ve cleaned up after you. I lost my sister too, Kayla. She was mine before she was ever yours.”
The coat slid off the hanger and onto the floor. I left it there.
“Every person in that room thinks I’m a monster now. Deb’s going to be on the phone to half of Kearney before they cut the cake. The cake I paid for.”
“I didn’t say one thing on that phone that wasn’t true. People sell houses. People’s kids move out. You’re twenty years old. I left home with a trash bag of clothes, and nobody threw me a reception.”
Dad was in the doorway.
His tie was loose. He had the dish towel look again, without the dish towel.
“Trish,” he said.
“Don’t. Don’t you start.”
“Did you have Rick Olander walk through my house?”
It was the only thing he asked her.
“It’s our house, Greg. As of four o’clock it’s our house. You said yourself it’s too much house. You said it this winter, shoveling that walk. I was going to bring it up after the honeymoon like a normal person, and she…”
She pointed at me without looking at me.
“She has been lying up there for a week with that thing next to her pillow, listening to me breathe.”
Dad looked at me.
“You plugged it in, Dad,” I said.
He looked at the floor.
Grandma came in with her keys jingling and bent down for my coat.
“Car’s warm,” she said. She said it to me, and to nobody else.
Tricia laughed. The sound came out wrong.
“Oh, go ahead. Go to Salina. Go live with her and her dead husband’s screws. You understand what you did in there? You had one piece of your mother left in this world, and it was me. I was it. And you just played it for eighty-six people off a phone.”
“I know,” I said.
Grandma held the coat open and I got my good arm in. She draped the other side over the cast.
Dad didn’t move out of the doorway. Then he did. He stepped aside to let us by.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
I stood in the lobby a second, waiting for him to say something else.
Behind the double doors the DJ started a song, loud, like somebody had told him to. Dad went back in toward the music. Tricia went in after him.
Grandma drove me by the house on Locust first.
She packed a duffel from my dresser while I sat on the bed. I didn’t go into the sewing room. I didn’t look at the pantry door frame, where my mom used to mark me in pencil every August.
The only thing I took from my mother’s house was the monitor, both halves.
Vern’s Coffee Can
The casts came off in March at a clinic in Salina.
My arm came out of the plaster thin and white and smelling like a gym sock. I cried a little, and Grandma pretended to read a magazine about boats.
Grandma’s house is a split-level, with the laundry in the basement and a railing Vern put up himself that wobbles if you lean on it.
Her knees are worse than she tells anybody. For a year she told me on the phone that she was fine on those stairs. The first week I was there, I watched her take them sideways with a basket on her hip.
The day after I could put my whole weight on my foot, I went down to the dryer and got Vern’s coffee can.
Screws of every size in there. Some nails. A single brown button off a man’s coat.
I found two screws that fit the bracket on the back of the listening half.
I put it on the wall beside her bed, at the height of her hand when she’s lying down. I kept the other half in my back pocket.
“You’re putting that thing on my wall?” she said.
“Just holler,” I said.
She rolled her eyes at me the way she used to roll them at Vern.
Dad calls some Fridays. We talk about the Huskers and the weather.
The house on Locust didn’t go up for sale in April. He mentioned it the way he mentions the weather. I didn’t ask him why, and he didn’t say.
That first night, the lights on the half in my pocket climbed to two while I was drying the supper dishes.
“Is that my girl?”
I set the towel down and held the button in.
“It’s me.”
“Come up here a minute. A cardinal’s on the feeder, and he’s fat as a cat.”
I went up the stairs on my own two feet.
I’ve gone every time she called since. She calls a lot. I think she likes hearing me on the stairs.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still calls their grandma at bedtime.
For more tales of family drama and unexpected twists, check out what happened when my husband carried my sewing machine out to the garage before I got home, or the time my Vans had parked behind Carol Pruitt’s garage every other Tuesday for three years. You might also enjoy hearing about how six weeks before my note came due, the banker’s son picked my fence table.
