Chapter 6: Mom's Seventieth

The Slovak club in Carrick smelled of cabbage, floor wax and seventy years of birthday cake.

My mother sat at the head of the long table in a lavender cardigan, with a paper crown that my sister's kids had made her.

She was turning seventy, and she had invited the entire parish.

The polka band in the corner was playing "Beer Barrel Polka" for the third time.

My nephew was dancing with a folding chair.

"Eat," my mother said, and pushed a plate of pierogi at me. "You're thin."

"I'm not thin, Ma."

"You look thin in the face," she said.

"That's the face I've always had."

"Then it's always been thin," she said, and cut a pierogi in half to settle it.

Jackie sat on my other side in a green dress, with her second glass of wine and her eyes on the door.

She had told me twenty minutes earlier, in the bathroom, that Rich was coming.

Our mother had invited him.

He had been her son-in-law for twelve years, and she had never once asked him to stop.

"I can leave," I had said.

"You can sit down, eat cake, and let him look at you," Jackie had said. "That's the whole plan."

So I was sitting down.

I had on my good navy dress and my hair in the bun.

My phone was in my lap, face down, with a text on it that I hadn't opened in a month.

I kept thinking about a flat nose.

It came into my head without asking, the bridge of it pushed to one side, the blue eyes above it.

I pushed it out and it came back.

Then the door opened, and Rich walked in.

He wore a gray quarter-zip and carried a card.

He was forty and he still had the same polite smile.

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