The Smart One (29 page)

Martha came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam. She closed the door and then listened to make sure that no one was outside the room. “It smells like an ashtray in there,” she whispered. “Last night, I woke up and there was smoke coming out from underneath the door.”

Claire laughed. Bets was a secret smoker, but it was a secret that wasn’t very well kept at all. When they were little, they used to ask Weezy, “Why does Bets smoke in the bathroom?” and Weezy would shush them.

“It’s her secret,” she told them. “She doesn’t want anyone to know, so we can’t say anything. She’d be embarrassed.”

And so, for years now, Bets would disappear into a bathroom and emerge with smoke billowing behind her. Sometimes she’d cough. “I’m getting a cold,” she’d say. And none of them would say a word.

Once, Claire and Doug had been sitting on the back deck, and Doug touched Claire’s arm and silently pointed up to the bathroom window,
where a hand holding a cigarette was going in and out of the window. Claire had shrugged. “It’s her thing,” she said. “She doesn’t want anyone to know. We just let her be and pretend we don’t see anything.”

“Your family,” Doug had said, “is just so Catholic, it kills me.” Claire never exactly knew what he meant, since secret smoking didn’t really seem like a Catholic trait to her.

Claire had also warned Doug that Bets was just a little bit racist. She wanted to give him fair warning. “You know,” she told him, “not like
really
racist but like old-people racist.” Doug had tilted his head like he didn’t quite understand, and she said, “You’ll see.”

“The president looks blacker on my TV,” Bets told Doug that night. Doug coughed on his water. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s true. He looks so much darker on my TV at home. He looks practically white here.”

“Mom,” Weezy said, “that’s enough.”

“What? I’m just making an observation. Come over and watch him on my TV and you’ll see what I mean. He looks blacker there.”

“Mom, drop it.”

Bets turned to Doug and shook her head. “No one can say anything these days. You can’t say a single thing without someone being offended, without the polite police coming to tie you up.”

That was Bets, always full of inappropriate comments. They spent every holiday whispering about her while she was in the next room. At least she made things interesting, and gave them something to talk about.

In her room, Martha was now drying her hair with the towel, then stopped and sprayed a can of air freshener in the direction of the bathroom and Bets. “One day,” she said to Claire, “she’s going to burn down the house.”

“I know,” Claire said. “And then we’re all going to have to lie to the firemen about what started it.”

CLAIRE STOOD IN THE SHOWER
for a long time. She let the hot stream run over her, and then she had to sit down because she started to feel a little nauseous. Even from inside the shower, Claire could hear Weezy yelling up the stairs at people, giving orders.

“I can do this,” she said to herself as she shampooed her hair. It was fine. She could make it for an hour, then have a drink and some appetizers and she’d be fine. Thank God their cousin Drew wasn’t coming this year. Not that Claire didn’t love him, but when he came to family gatherings, they all abstained from drinking out of support. It was miserable. Well, all of them abstained except for Bets, who once told him that she thought alcoholics were people that couldn’t handle their liquor. “Maybe you’ll get the hang of it as you get older,” she’d said to him. Maureen was out smoking on the deck, but Weezy had stepped in to defend him.

“Mom, Drew has a disease and he’s been very brave in dealing with it,” she said, in a speech that would have made any Lifetime Movie writer proud. It was embarrassing to watch Weezy standing there, knowing that she thought she was doing something very important.

Weezy put her hand on Drew’s shoulder and the three of them stood in an awkward triangle, until Bets said, “Cancer is a disease. Not being able to drink is just a goddamn shame.”

Claire was all for abstaining when Drew was there, although sometimes she wondered if he really was an alcoholic or if maybe that was just where his problems showed themselves. He was only twenty-two when he went into rehab—a baby, practically. Which one of them wasn’t an irresponsible drinker at that age? But Claire kept this thought to herself, since Drew seemed to be doing well in the program and had gotten his life back on track.

The last time he’d come, two Thanksgivings ago, the dinner seemed to drag on forever as they’d sipped at Diet Cokes and some stupid raspberry spritzer that Weezy had made in an attempt to have a fun nonalcoholic cocktail. Bets had gotten drunk by herself, not needing any of them to join her. She was happy as a clam to down glass after glass, and all of them realized that she was much harder to deal with when they were all sober. As Drew had pulled out of the driveway that night, Weezy was already opening a bottle of red.

“Good God,” Claire said to Max. “It looks like Mom’s going to rip the cork out with her teeth.”

So, yes, it was better that Drew wasn’t coming. After all, Cathy was enough to deal with. The first year after she came out, she’d made a
point to mention her sexuality at every turn. When she first brought Ruth to meet the family, she’d made a point to introduce her to Bets in a way that left no room for misinterpretation.

“Bets, this is my girlfriend, Ruth,” she said. “And by
girlfriend
, I mean
sexual partner
.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Max had said under his breath, and he and Claire had laughed. Martha shot them a look, like they were being rude, but really. She didn’t know why Cathy had to talk about her sex life all the time. No one else did. Claire was all for it, thought it was great and that Cathy should be who she was and they could all live life together. Cathy was the one that talked about it all the time, and that got tiring. It wasn’t like she’d invented being a lesbian.

“IT’S INTERESTING,”
CATHY SAID ONCE
at a family dinner. “Some people would think that my father being a misogynist had something to do with me being a lesbian. I don’t believe that sexuality is something we choose, but others disagree. Some think it’s something we learn.” Then she’d turned to Claire. “What do you think?”

Claire had just shrugged. How was one supposed to even answer that question? She didn’t remember Uncle Harold all that well. He’d been around when they were younger, and then he and Maureen had separated and he’d moved to Oregon. Claire hadn’t seen him since.

She remembered the time (the only time, she was pretty sure) that Cathy and Drew went to visit him there, how Cathy had called Maureen from some strange person’s house to tell her that she and Drew had been left there, that their dad had gone out and told them to “stay put.” Maureen had come over to the Coffeys’ that night, screaming and crying, was on the phone with the police in Portland, trying to get them over to her children. She’d flown out there the next morning and had come back with Cathy and Drew.

Maybe Harold visited once or twice after that, maybe he’d come to a birthday party that Cathy had, but Claire was fuzzy on that. And soon, as the years went by, they stopped talking about him at all. It was like he’d never even existed. Claire had no idea if he was a misogynist or not. Mostly she just thought he was a really shitty dad.

DOWNSTAIRS, WEEZY HAD A NEW APRON
on that was already covered in stuffing and potatoes. The kitchen table had casserole dishes spread all over it, with different Post-it notes stuck to each one that said things like,
Bake at 350 for 20 minutes, uncover for last 10
, and
Vegan Stuffing!
And
Put in the same time as sweet potatoes
. And then there was one note that said, inexplicably,
Will and Green Beans
.

Weezy kept reaching up to push her hair out of her face. She looked hot and annoyed. Cathy, Ruth, and Maureen had arrived and all crowded themselves into the kitchen. They were chatting away, believing themselves to be kind in keeping Weezy company, but Claire knew that all Weezy wanted was for them to get the hell out of her kitchen so that she could spill and curse and cook in peace.

Will and Bets were in the living room, watching the TV in silence. They both seemed happy. Will just wanted to watch the football game, and Bets was probably just gauging the blackness of the NFL players on this screen as opposed to her own.

Max and Cleo were in the basement. They’d been kind of quiet all weekend, and she thought they might have had a fight of some kind. Poor Max. It wasn’t easy to deal with a significant other in this household.

Martha was at the stove, stirring apples and cranberries and looking worried. She’d made this dish every year for the past ten years, and still every time she fretted about it and tasted it, apologizing to everyone that it wasn’t quite right, until people praised it so much that she smiled down at her plate and said, “It’s not that hard.”

When Claire walked into the kitchen, Weezy was arranging appetizers on a platter and Cathy was eating crackers and talking about her job, which had something to do with computer programming. Ruth saw Claire and gave her a hug. “Hi!” she said, like they hadn’t just seen each other the night before. Claire always liked Ruth, and sometimes wanted to pull her aside and say, “You know you can do better than Cathy, right? You’re way nicer.”

“Okay then,” Weezy said. She clapped her hands and then held them together like she was praying, which maybe she was, for strength
to make it through the day. “Ruth? Would you take these out to the family room and then why doesn’t everyone head out that way to spend some time with Bets.”

Ruth nodded and picked up the tray of cheese and crackers. Cathy followed behind her, still talking about her job—something about a man named Brett, and why he was responsible for spreading a virus throughout the company.

“What can I do to help?” Maureen asked.

“Nothing. Really, we’re all set. You can go relax.”

“I think I forgot to add cinnamon,” Martha said. “Oh shoot!” The mixture boiled and spit a little bit, and Martha jumped back to avoid it.

“I can stay in here,” Maureen said. But Weezy just shook her head, and Maureen got up and headed out, looking like she was being punished. During Thanksgiving, Maureen ended up sulking and smoking in corners of the backyard, looking like a teenage version of herself.

“I’ll go see if people need drinks,” Claire said. She took orders in the family room—white wine spritzer for Bets, beer for Cathy, white wine for Ruth, and for Maureen “anything with vodka.”

“Do you want some help?” Will asked, but his eyes were still on the game.

“I’m good.”

Claire went to the bar and first made herself a large Bloody Mary with olives. After a few sips of that, she took the drinks to the family room and delivered them to each person with a napkin. She took her drink and walked down to the basement, knocking on the doorframe.

“You guys? Are you in there?”

“Hey,” Max said. He sounded tired. Claire peered around the side of the door and saw both of them sitting on the bed. Cleo’s eyes looked a little red. They were definitely fighting.

“You should come up soon,” Claire said. “Cathy’s talking about her job, which is fascinating, and Bets is getting ready to tell us all why we’re a disappointment. You don’t want to miss it.”

“We’ll be up in a minute,” Max said. He didn’t smile.

Claire felt bad for them. Once, during a trip with Doug’s family, she and Doug had gotten into a fight about the cable bill. It was so stupid,
but at the time she was so mad she thought she was going to scream at him, right in front of his parents. She’d found the bill and saw that he’d added this crazy football package that basically doubled the price.

“We split this bill,” she’d hissed at him in their room. “And you didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me about it? To ask me?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Doug said. “I’ll pay for it.” Then he tried to shush her, which she hated.

“Don’t you shush me,” she’d said. “Don’t you dare shush me.”

The Winkleplecks were a quiet family. They never yelled. At dinner, if someone accidentally interrupted another person, they’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry. Go on.” There was no talking over anyone else. When someone started telling a story, the whole family turned and gave that one person their total attention. It made Claire feel very nervous to ever talk around them.

She knew Doug was scared that his parents were going to hear them fighting. “Shhh,” he kept saying. “It’s fine. I’ll pay for it, okay?”

“That’s not the point,” Claire had said. But she couldn’t quite say what the point was, exactly. Just that she was so mad at him that she wanted to scream, and she wanted him to scream back. But they couldn’t, and that made it worse. And Mr. and Mrs. Winklepleck were always there, quietly reading or watching TV at a very low volume. There was nowhere to go, and Claire stayed mad at him the whole trip.

And now it looked like poor Max was in the same situation. “Okay, guys,” Claire said. “See you up there. You want me to bring some drinks down here for you?”