As soon as we were in the kitchen, Mom let out a sigh. “I think sitting in that bed all the time is driving him crazy. I try to move him around as much as I can—you know getting him into chairs or coming into the kitchen. But it doesn’t seem to help all that much. He’s just getting cabin fever. He wants to be up doing something useful. I think he’s embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed about what?” I asked, going into the refrigerator to pull out some ingredients for the lemon pie I had planned.
“He’s so used to feeling like he’s taking care of everybody. It makes him feel like he’s not doing enough when he can’t get up and work, or at least help me around the house,” she said.
“Well, that’s silly. He can’t help that he fell and hurt himself. Besides, he’s done so much for the family my whole life. He needs to just let us take care of him for a little while.”
“I agree,” Mom said. “We just have to convince him. And I’m hoping that seeing some other people and having them not treat him any different is going to help a lot.”
She just slipped that smoothly into the conversation, which I knew meant she was trying to tell me something without telling me. I looked at her suspiciously.
“Did you have someone in mind for that particular mission?” I asked.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she asked, which meant she didn’t tell me. “I ran into Susan at the deli.”
“Susan… Anderson?” I asked. “Mason’s mom?”
“Yes,” Mom said, pulling out a saucepan and putting it on the stove so we could start the lemon curd. “I invited her and Robert to come over for a barbecue this weekend. They’re going to bring the boys.”
She said that like they were hauling along their gaggle of toddlers, and not like they were bringing a group of grown men.
“You have fun with that,” I said. “Let me know how it goes.”
“What do you mean? You’ll be here, of course,” Mom said.
“No. No, I won’t. You can have that whole thing to yourself.”
“Oh, Ava. It will be fun. We’ve been friends for years. We have continued to get our hair done together twice a month even after the breakup. Not everything is about you, you know,” she said.
There she went with the Mom guilt. She was particularly good at it. Somehow it was even more effective now that I was home to help them out. It should have been the opposite. Since I was the one who uprooted my life and came back home to make things easier for them, they shouldn’t really be able to guilt me. Yet, she had the power.
“Fine. I’ll come. But only if I can bring Stephanie,” I said.
The bartering worked. Mom agreed to my terms under the condition that along with Stephanie, I brought a side dish. Everybody in town knew my mother made the best coleslaw and macaroni salad on the planet, so I had to think of something else.
After finishing up the pie, I helped Mom with some cleaning around the house, then spent a couple hours hanging out with my father. I headed out that afternoon with leftover pie and complaints to share with Stephanie.
When I got to her house, I noticed a man gripping a few articles of clothing as he snuck out of the side door and rushed toward the back of the house. He looked vaguely familiar from a distance, but I couldn’t really tell who it was. Stephanie answered the front door on the first knock, her hair a little wild and her expression saying she didn’t expect me.
“I have to make macaroni and cheese,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“Mom says I have to bring a side dish, so I’m making macaroni and cheese,” I said, pushing past her into the house.
“Your mother is hosting nightly potlucks now?” She closed the door and followed me into the living room where I flopped onto the couch.
“No. I mean for the barbecue.” I lifted my head and looked at her. “Who was that guy sneaking out of your house?”
She looked around; her eyes wide with mock innocence. “What guy?”
“You know what guy. Who was he?” I asked.
She shook her head, waving her hand in front of her face to brush the question away. “Nobody. Don’t worry about it. Just a friend who stopped by.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. She wasn’t going to admit who it was. Which meant he was probably someone who shouldn’t be sneaking out of her house.
“What barbecue are you talking about?” she asked.
She curled up onto the overstuffed white chair at the corner of the couch and reached for a mug of coffee she already had sitting on the table in front of her.
“Apparently, my mother invited the entire Anderson clan over to their house for a barbecue this weekend,” I said.