She was watching Susan very carefully. Very quietly. With her hands folded on top of her book.
“So when your mother told me this house was getting harder for her,” Susan said, “but she kept saying, over and over, how much she loved having everybody here—how much she loved cooking for everybody, how the house felt empty without people in it—I thought I understood. I thought, I’m not going to do to Maggie what I did to my mother. I’m not going to take this away from her.“
“So you thought making her wait on you hand and foot,” I said, “was helping her?”
“I thought,” Susan said, “letting her host the way she wanted to host was helping her. Letting her feel needed.”
And for one uncomfortable second, I could almost see how she got there.
Almost.
A woman who’d hurt her own mother by doing too much. Who’d sworn she’d never do it again. Who swung all the way to the other side.
Almost.
Then I remembered the flowers.
“And what does any of that,” I said, “have to do with leaving your coffee cup on the table every morning?”
Susan didn’t answer.
“Or making her drive forty minutes to town,” I said, “because you don’t like the mayonnaise she buys?”
Nothing.
“Or telling her where she’s allowed to put her own flowers? In her own house? That her husband bought? That she’s been coming to for thirty years?”
Susan’s face changed.
Across from her, my mother looked down at her lap.
I kept going. I couldn’t stop now.
“Maybe that’s why you let her make breakfast the first weekend,” I said. “Maybe that’s even why you let her make it the second weekend. Because you were trying to let her feel needed. Fine. I believe you.”
I looked right at her.
“But that isn’t why you stopped saying thank you.”
Susan’s mouth opened.
Then it closed.
She didn’t have an answer.
Richard was staring down at the deck boards. At his own feet. In his fishing hat.
Daniel was standing behind him in the doorway. Very still.
Nobody said anything. The wind moved through the pine trees around the cabin. A boat went by out on the lake, far away. A loon called somewhere.
It was a long, long silence.
And then my mother spoke.
“I do like it,” she said.
I turned toward her.
She folded her hands on top of her mystery novel. She looked out at the water.
“I like cooking for everybody,” Mom said. “I really do. I like having all the bedrooms full. I like hearing people moving around down here in the morning. I like the sound of it. The dishes. The voices. Somebody laughing on the deck.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“When your father died,” she said to me, “this house was so quiet. For so long. Two whole summers, I couldn’t come up here. Because it was so quiet. And now it’s not quiet anymore. And I love that. I really do love that.”
Susan looked relieved. Too quickly. Her shoulders came down.
But my mother wasn’t finished.
“But I suppose,” Mom said slowly, “I got carried away.”
“With what, Mom?” I asked.
She looked at me.
“Trying to make them want to come back,” she said.
I didn’t understand at first.
I just stood there on the deck. Looking at her.
And then I did.
All at once. Like a wave coming in off the lake.
My mother gave a small, embarrassed little laugh. She looked down at her hands.
“You got married, honey,” she said. “And suddenly there was this whole other family. Susan and Richard. Daniel’s aunts and uncles and cousins. All these people I didn’t know. And I just—” She stopped. “I wanted things to be easy. For you. I wanted them to like being here. I wanted them to like me. I wanted you to never have to worry that your mother and your husband’s mother couldn’t get along.”
I looked at her.
“The sheets,” I said quietly.
Mom smiled. Just a little. A tired, sheepish smile.
“The sheets,” she said.
“The four-hundred-thread-count sheets. And the new towels. And the little soap basket in the bathroom.”
“I wanted everybody to be comfortable.”
“The special mayonnaise,” I said. “Eleven dollars a jar.”
“Susan likes it,” Mom said.
“The peach cobbler. Every Saturday night. Because Richard said once, back in June, that he liked peach cobbler.”
Across the deck, Richard looked up. Surprised.
“You make that for me?” he said. “Every week?”
“You said you liked it,” Mom said.
Richard looked stricken.
“I did say that,” he said slowly. “I remember saying that. I don’t even—I don’t even really like peach cobbler that much. I was just being polite.”
My mother stared at him.
And then, for some reason, she started to laugh.
“Every time we came back,” I said. “Every Friday night. When our cars pulled in.”
Mom looked at me. She stopped laughing.
“I thought I was doing something right,” she said quietly.
The whole summer rearranged itself in my head. Like furniture being moved around in a room.
My mother hadn’t been serving Susan just because she couldn’t say no. Just because she was soft. Just because she wanted to keep the peace.
She’d been auditioning.
For eight weeks. Every weekend. Every pancake, every pot roast, every eleven-dollar jar of mayonnaise, every coffee cup picked up off the side table.
She’d been auditioning for a place in my new family.
She’d been trying to earn it.
Susan was looking at my mother. Her face had gone pale.
“Maggie,” she said. “I thought—I honestly thought you liked doing all of this. That it made you happy. You always looked so happy.”
Mom nodded.
“I do like it,” she said.
Susan blinked. Confused.
And then my mother said the thing that I think about all the time now. The thing I’ve written down and stuck on my own refrigerator at home.
“I like taking care of people, Susan,” Mom said quietly. “I don’t like being taken for granted. Those aren’t the same thing.”
Nobody had anything to say after that.
Susan sat very still in her plastic chair. Looking at my mother. Looking at the corner of the deck. At the six blue flower boxes full of red geraniums, sitting next to the trash cans.
Richard took off his fishing hat. He held it in both hands.
Daniel came out onto the deck. He sat down on the steps. He didn’t say anything either.
We all just sat there. The five of us. On my mother’s deck. Looking at the lake.
For a long time.
At five o’clock, Susan came into the kitchen.
She stood in front of the dry-erase board. She read it again.
Her name was beside dinner. Saturday: Susan.
For a second, I thought we were about to start the whole fight all over again. I braced myself. I was standing at the sink, washing lettuce.
Susan stared at the board.
Then she turned around and looked at my mother. Who was sitting at the kitchen table. With her mystery novel. On page thirty-one now. She’d made some progress.
“Maggie,” Susan said. “What were you planning to make? For tonight?”
Mom started to stand up.
I gave her a look.
She sat back down.
“Chicken,” Mom said. “With roasted potatoes. And green beans. The chicken’s in the refrigerator. I marinated it last night.”
Susan sighed. A long sigh. Like somebody about to climb a mountain.
“Fine,” she said. “Where do you keep the potatoes?”
Dinner wasn’t great.
It wasn’t awful either.
Susan overcooked the chicken. It was a little dry. Like the eggs. She forgot to put salt on the green beans. The potatoes were a little crunchy in the middle.
She asked about every single cabinet in the kitchen. Where’s the baking sheet? Where’s the olive oil? Where’s the pepper? Is this the oven mitt or a pot holder? What’s the difference?
But halfway through cooking, something changed.
She stopped asking my mother.
She started looking for things herself. Opening drawers. Opening cabinets. Finding things.
At one point, she found the spatula. The one she couldn’t find that morning. It was hanging on a hook on the side of the refrigerator. Right where it’s always been.
She held it up. She looked at it.
“Huh,” she said.
We all sat down to eat.
Susan’s dry chicken. Susan’s crunchy potatoes. Susan’s unsalted green beans.
Everybody ate everything.
“This is good, Mom,” Daniel said.
“No, it isn’t,” Susan said.
“It’s fine,” Richard said.
“It’s edible,” Susan said.
My mother took a bite of chicken. She chewed very slowly. Very carefully.
“It’s very good, Susan,” she said. “Thank you.”
Susan looked at her. For a long moment.
“You’re welcome, Maggie,” she said.
After dinner, my mom automatically reached for the plates.
Out of habit. Thirty years of habit. Her hands just went out on their own.
But Susan picked them up first.
“Leave those,” Susan said. “I’ll get them.”
My mother smiled.
And then her expression changed.
“Don’t you tell me to sit down either, Susan,” Mom said.
Susan froze. With a stack of plates in her hands.
And for the first time all day, I almost laughed.
Susan caught herself.
“Right,” she said. “Right. I’m sorry.”
She stood there holding the plates against her chest.
“Maggie,” she said carefully. “Would you like to help? With the dishes?”
My mother thought about it.
She really thought about it. I watched her think.
“No,” she said.
“Okay,” Susan said.
And she carried the dishes into the kitchen by herself.
That night, I found my mother on the deck. Alone. After everybody else had gone to bed.
She was sitting in the plastic chair in the corner. By her flower boxes. Looking at the lake. The moon was out. The water was silver.
I sat down next to her.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “For what I said this morning. About being everybody’s maid. That was mean.”
“It was a little mean,” she agreed.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “But it was also a little true.”
We sat there. The loon called again. Somewhere far out on the water.
“Your father would have hated this summer,” Mom said suddenly.
I looked at her.
“He would have hated watching me do all that,” she said. “Every weekend. He used to say I’d give away my own shoes if somebody said they liked them. He used to take things out of my hands. Not to do them for me. Just to make me stop. He’d take the dish towel and hide it.”
She laughed. A little.
“He hid a lot of dish towels,” she said. “I found one in the tackle box once. Three years after he died.”
I took her hand.
“I miss him,” she said.
“I know, Mom. I do too.”
The next morning, I came downstairs at seven.
Mom was already up. Sitting at the kitchen table. In her robe. With a cup of coffee she’d made just for herself. Reading her mystery novel. She was on page eighty-four.
The kitchen was quiet.
And in the sink, there was a coffee cup. Rinsed out. Upside down.
Susan’s coffee cup. The white one with the gold rim that she always uses.
She’d already been down. She’d made her own coffee. And she’d brought her cup in from the deck and rinsed it out and put it in the sink.
I didn’t say anything about it.
Neither did my mother.
We just looked at each other. And she smiled. And went back to her book.
Richard went to town for groceries that morning. By himself. He came back with a whole bag full of stuff. Including the regular mayonnaise.
“Susan said it’s fine,” he said, putting it in the refrigerator. “She said she was being silly. About the avocado stuff.”
He held up another jar. A glass one.
“I also got her one of these,” he said sheepishly. “Just in case.”
Before they left on Sunday afternoon, Susan went looking for my mother.
She found her on the deck. In the plastic chair in the corner. Still next to the flower boxes.
I stayed in the kitchen. Close enough to hear through the open sliding door. I didn’t pretend I wasn’t listening.
Susan stood there for a moment. She looked at the geraniums. The six blue boxes. The bright red flowers. Sitting in the corner by the trash cans.
“Maggie,” Susan said. “I’m sorry. About those. The flowers.”
My mother didn’t say anything.
“I shouldn’t have told you to move them,” Susan said. “It’s your house. It was a terrible thing to say. I don’t even know why I said it.”
My mother looked up at her.
“No,” Mom said quietly. “You shouldn’t have.”
And Susan accepted that.
She didn’t make any excuses. She didn’t say I was tired or I didn’t mean it like that or I was just joking. She didn’t give a big speech. She didn’t explain.
She just stood there. And she took it.
Then she looked at the flowers again. For a long moment.
“They are pretty,” she said.
My mother smiled.
“I know,” she said.
Daniel was loading our bags into the car out front.
Susan walked back through the kitchen on her way out. With her purse over her shoulder and her sunglasses on her head.
She stopped at the kitchen table.
She looked at the dry-erase board.
I’d already wiped it clean that morning. For next weekend. It was blank again. White and empty.
Susan picked up the black marker from the little ledge at the bottom.
For a second, I thought she was going to write something mean. Or erase the whole thing. Or make some kind of joke.
Instead, she uncapped the marker.
And at the top of the blank board, in neat, careful handwriting, she wrote:
Susan — Saturday breakfast.
She capped the marker. She put it back on the ledge.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at me.
She just walked out the front door.
On her way to the car, she walked past the deck.
Past the big lounger with the striped cushion. The one in the middle of the deck. With the best view of the water. The one she’d been lying in all summer.
She paused next to it.
She looked at the lounger.
Then she looked at the corner of the deck. At the six blue boxes of red geraniums.
Then she did something I’ll never forget.
She walked over to the corner. She picked up one of the flower boxes. With both hands. It was heavy. Full of wet dirt.
She carried it across the deck. And she set it back on the railing. Right in front of the lounger. Right where my mother had put it.
Then she went back and got another one.
And another one.
She moved all six of them. By herself. Back to the railing. Every single one.
She was out of breath when she was done. Her white linen cover-up had dirt on it.
My mother was standing in the sliding glass door. Watching. With her hand over her mouth.
Susan brushed off her hands.
Then she looked at the lounger. At the view of the lake. At the six boxes of red geraniums blocking part of it.
She didn’t say a word.
She just picked up a plastic chair from the corner. And she moved it to the other end of the deck. Where you could see the whole lake. Past the flowers.
And she sat down in it. For just a minute. To look at the water.
Then she got up and walked to the car.
My mom noticed.
So did I.
I set my alarm for five o’clock that Sunday morning because I thought I needed to teach my mother-in-law a lesson. That nobody was there to serve her. That my mother wasn’t the hired help.
And I did. I think she learned it.
But that wasn’t the only thing that changed that weekend.
My mom stopped treating every visit like a test she had to pass.
The next weekend, she made breakfast on Sunday. Because she wanted to. Not because anybody expected it. Susan made breakfast on Saturday, like she wrote on the board. Scrambled eggs. Less dry this time. She’d watched a video, she told us.
The weekend after that, Mom and Susan made dinner together. Mom taught Susan how to make her pot roast. They stood side by side at the stove in the orange-countertop kitchen, arguing about how much garlic to use.
“More,” Mom said.
“That’s already a lot.”
“More, Susan.”
Susan put in more.
It was the best pot roast I’d ever had.
Susan started carrying her own plate. Every meal. Without anybody looking at her. She started asking before she expected something. Maggie, would it be okay if I took the kayak out? Maggie, do you mind if I use the last of the coffee?
She started doing just enough work to understand how much had always been happening around her. How much my mother had been carrying. All summer. Every weekend.
On the last weekend in August, when we closed up the cabin for the season, Susan got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the bathroom floor.
Nobody asked her to.
She just did it.
When she was done, she stood up, and her knees cracked, and she said, “Good Lord. You do this every single week, Maggie?”
“Every single week,” Mom said.
Susan looked at her for a long moment.
“You’re a saint,” she said. “Or crazy. One of the two.”
“Probably both,” Mom said.
They both laughed.
And I learned something too.
I learned that defending my mother didn’t mean I had to fight every single battle for her. It didn’t mean yelling at Susan. It didn’t mean making a scene. It didn’t mean ruining thirty Christmases.
Sometimes I just had to get up at five o’clock in the morning with a dry-erase marker.
Sometimes I just had to make enough room for her to finally say no.
And then step back.
And let her say it.
We went up to the lake again last weekend. The first weekend of the new summer.
My mother had already planted her geraniums. Six blue boxes. Bright red flowers.
The dry-erase board was on the kitchen table when we got there. Propped against the fruit bowl.
At the top, in my mother’s handwriting, it said WEEKEND JOBS.
Underneath, there were five names. Everybody had a job. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, groceries, cleanup. Rotating.
At the bottom, next to her own name, my mother had written:
Maggie: Sunday breakfast. And enjoy my house.
She’d underlined my. Twice.
The geraniums stayed exactly where she planted them.
All summer.
And every morning, when Susan came out on the deck with her coffee, she walked right past the big lounger with the striped cushion. And she sat in the plastic chair at the end of the deck. Where you can see the whole lake.
Past the flowers.
Past the party.