Part 3 — Cherry Street House
Ken began to speak, and Mike held up one hand, and for once in his life my husband stopped. The whole room had turned toward me. I set down my coffee, since coffee was all I had left to hold, and I said, “Which house, Ken?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “The house on Cherry Street. Mother wants to sell it. We have been talking since the fall.”
I had missed the second half of that sentence. Dolores wanted to sell the white house on Cherry Street where Ken grew up, and she wanted to put the money, together with the gift account, into building a first-floor suite in our house. His study would become her bedroom. They had picked a contractor. They had even picked, I learned, the paint. Nobody had asked me, and the only reason nobody had told me was a quiet fear that I would say no.
I did not say no. I did not say anything for a long moment, because what came to me was twenty years of Christmas mornings: the cardigan, the coffee maker, the pearls. Each one chosen carefully, each one returned by the twenty-seventh, each one laughed over at the table. I had thought I was unloved. What I understood now was that I had been managed, which is a different thing, and in some ways a lonelier one.
Dolores spoke first, and she did not look at the tree. “Corinne, the account was not for the house, at first. It began as a cushion, so Ken would never have to ask you for money to look after me. Your gifts were too nice to keep, and I did not want to need them. Returning them felt like holding on to a little of my pride. Then it became a habit, and then a joke, and I am afraid I enjoyed it too much to stop.”
That was more honest than anything she had said to me in thirty-one years, and I told her so. Then I told her the rest. I said, “Dolores, I will not tell you how to live. You may sell your house. But you may not move into mine without being asked. That is a decision for two people, and I am the second one.” I said I would gladly help her find a place near the church, with her own front door and a window she liked.
Ken stood up. His ears were still red, and his hands did not seem to know where to go. He said it in front of everyone, which I will always give him credit for. He said he had laughed to keep the peace, and that he had let his mother make too many decisions for too long, and that he had left me alone in the middle of it. “I was a coward at your table, Corinne,” he said. “I am sorry.”
Mike offered to take his mother home with him for a few days. Ken did not argue. After the guests had gone, and the dishes were done, my husband and I sat in the kitchen with the last of the coffee, and neither of us spoke for a long while. I did not forgive him that night. I told him that I would be at the church on Tuesday at nine, as always, and that he could call Pastor Reiner to ask about counseling for the two of us.
The numbers came out in the first week of January. Mike, who does the taxes of his mother, pulled the statements. The account held nine thousand six hundred dollars. I opened my recipe box and took out the card where, for twenty years, I had written every gift and what it cost. The total came to nine thousand four hundred and twelve dollars. The account and the list agreed almost to the penny.
Dolores asked to see me. She sat in her good chair with her purse in her lap. “The money is yours,” she said. “It always was.” I thought about it all night. In the morning I asked that it go to the food pantry at our church, in her name. She looked at me for a long time, her chin trembling, and then she said, “That is a better present than any I returned.”
A gift is only returned when the giver is not seen, and the kindest thing to do is to look again.
In February she moved into a first-floor apartment at Bay Pines, four blocks from the church, with a front door of her own and a window that faced the garden. The house on Cherry Street sold in a week, and the money paid for her care. Ken carried boxes. I hung her curtains. Dolores supervised from the doorway, and, on the second day, she asked me where I thought the reading light should go.
I had given her the brass light on Christmas Eve, and she had kept it, the first present she had not returned in twenty years. We set it beside her chair and plugged it in. She sat down and picked up a book, and the pleated shade turned the room gold. “It is a good light,” she said, without looking up. “I cannot imagine why I would sell it.” I laughed so hard that I had to sit down on her bed.
The following Christmas Eve we all gathered in her apartment, ten of us, shoulder to shoulder. I brought a tin of her own cranberry bread, baked from the recipe on the card in my box. Dolores opened it and lifted the foil. Then she looked around the table, slowly, at her sons, at me. “I will not be returning this one,” she announced. This time, when everyone laughed, Ken laughed the quietest, and I took his hand.