All of that, the cooking together and watching the fireflies and talking about love, happened a year or so before her mother died, when Claire first got breasts, when boys started to notice her. In the time that had passed since those afternoons at the kitchen table, painting their nails or playing Crazy Eights or making Waldorf salad—Claire carefully mixing the apples and nuts her mother had chopped into the mayonnaise and sour cream—Claire wondered what advice her mother would give her now. Would she have said Claire should marry Peter, a good provider, a man who was indeed steady but who could not show warmth or share intimacies? What would she think of Claire now, pregnant with someone else’s baby? Living in shame every time her husband even glanced at her? Fuck me, Claire used to whisper to Miles. Hadn’t her mother told her that a woman never swears in front of a man? She could still hear her mother saying “H-E-double hockey sticks!” when her cake came out of the oven too dry or her gravy lumped up. Fuck me, Claire would beg him.
Sometimes, driving home from meeting Miles, her thighs sticky and her skin flushed pink, Claire got a clear picture of her mother, as clear as if she had seen her just yesterday: wearing a soft green dress cinched at the waist with a yellow ruffled apron over it and beige high-heeled pumps, bent over the oven, her back straight, a dish towel she had knit herself, off-white with even red stripes, in her hands, as she pulled out a cake pan. She touched the top of the cake with her fingertip, able to tell its doneness by the way it sprang back. “H-E-double hockey sticks,” she said, her voice so full of disappointment that Claire’s heart broke remembering. “It’s only a cake,” Claire’s father told her. Her mother looked at him, “George,” she said, “It’s not just a cake. This is what I do.”
Standing at the nurses’ station in that hospital where her mother-in-law lay dying down the hall, Claire’s mind raced with these memories, strange fragments she thought she had forgotten. She thought of Gloria Delray, who had gone to college, to the University of Indiana in Bloomington.
“What are you studying there?” Claire had asked her that first winter after they’d graduated from high school and Gloria had come home for the holidays. The two girls ran into each other at the five-and-dime on a cold afternoon just before Christmas. Outside the wind howled. The sky was gray with snow-filled clouds. Gloria had her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a red and white University of Indiana jacket over a red turtleneck and dark blue dungarees. She smiled at Claire as if Claire didn’t know anything about anything.
“I’m going to get my MRS,” Gloria said in the same sure way she used to order a crowd of hundreds to give her a W.
At first, Claire didn’t understand what Gloria meant. By the time she did, Gloria was already heading toward the door, clutching her bag of last-minute presents: a bottle of Jean Naté and a tin of cherry pipe tobacco and a matchbox car.
“Oh!” Claire said, thinking that Gloria was clever. “Your MRS! But what about Danny?”
Gloria laughed. “Danny isn’t going anywhere, Claire.”
If her mother had been alive that day, Claire would have asked her what she thought about that. Danny Jones was working in his family’s supermarket. He would be a good provider, Claire thought. Her father had some saying about how the cobbler’s son always had shoes. Danny’s children would always have food, wouldn’t they? Where exactly did Gloria want to go with her MRS?
“Are you lost?” an orderly pushing a mop asked Claire.
Yes, Claire wanted to say, but she shook her head and thanked him.
Slowly she made her way back to Birdy’s room where nothing had changed. The old woman lay in the bed, unmoving. Peter was gone, probably getting more coffee. The room seemed vacant, even though someone was in it.
Claire went to the window and adjusted the blinds, letting in the early morning sun. She paused to admire the way the ice-covered branches glistened.
When she turned back around, she was surprised to see her mother-in-law’s eyes open.
Claire smiled at her, but the old woman’s face was crossed with confusion.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Claire. I’m Claire.” Claire wondered if she should go and get someone, a nurse or even the doctor.
The old woman stared at her hard. Then her face softened and she shook her head sadly. “I thought you were someone else,” she said, and closed her eyes.
“No,” Claire said.
She waited, but her mother-in-law did not speak or open her eyes again.
When Peter came in, he stopped as soon as he saw the look on Claire’s face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Your mother,” Claire said. “She talked to me.”
His eyes shifted from Claire’s face to his mother’s. “Claire,” he said as if he were speaking to Kathy.
“She opened her eyes and asked who I was and when I told her she got disappointed and said she thought I was someone else. Then she went back to sleep.”
“She knows you,” Peter said. “Don’t be silly.”
Claire didn’t respond. The man is always right, even when he’s wrong. Wasn’t that what her mother had told her?
“I’m feeling quite irritable,” Claire said.
“Are you feeling sick again?”
“Irritable,” Claire said gruffly.
“I believe you,” Peter chuckled.
They stared at his mother, Claire half expecting her eyes to fly open and for her to say something else. But she didn’t. The big hand on the clock moved noisily into place.
“I should have brought my knitting,” Claire said, although she didn’t really want to tackle that difficult sweater.
“Why don’t you go back to the house and get it?” Peter said.
The idea of getting fresh air, of being free of all this and driving through the snowy city suddenly seemed like exactly what she needed.