Thicker than Water (2 page)

“Maybe when I get this fudge done for the Strawberry Festival, I can help,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “My sister's coming down to help for a while.”

“Well, that's good,” she said.

“Actually, I was here to talk to you about the Strawberry Festival,” I said.

“Oh, sure,” she said, and wiped her hands on a towel sitting on the counter.

“You've got somebody to run the store those weekends, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Scott's going to forgo the car show up in St. Charles and man the store.”

“So, I can count on you at booth number four on Saturday from seven to three and”—I fished a piece of paper out of my pants pocket—“and booth number two on Sunday from noon to four.”

“That's right,” she said.

“Great,” I said.

“Have you inspected this year's batch yet?” Helen asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I'm on my way over there now.”

“I hear it's the best yet,” Helen said.

“Good,” I said. “I'll talk to you later.”

“Torie, are you all right?” Helen asked.

“Fine. Just tired,” I said and started to go.

“Oh, you forgot your fudge,” Helen said, laying the slab on the counter. She went to the cash register and punched in some numbers. “It's—”

I handed her a twenty. “Keep the change.”

It was June in New Kassel. Quite frankly, May, June, and October are the best months in central Missouri. May and June are warm but not too humid, and everything is green. The past few years have been really dry, so by the time July gets here, the trees and grass are turning brown. But June—well, June is warm, green, and lush. I walked along, making the turns where I needed to, without really paying attention to what street I was on. I didn't need to. I knew the town that well. Within a few minutes, I found myself at Virginia Burgermeister's door.

I knocked and waited. A round, gregarious, pink woman answered the door, wearing a chartreuse apron over a very old peach paisley dress. Close to seventy, Virgie Burgermeister, the mother-in-law of Charity Burgermeister, was one of the nicest people in the world. Her cooking could rival even my mother's.

She was our Head Jam Maker. In this town, that was a very important title.

“Virgie, good to see you,” I said.

“Come on in, Torie.” She swung the door open. “I was expectin' you to come by soon. You wanna taste this year's batch?”

“I can't wait.”

I walked through her small and very claustrophobic two-bedroom house. Much of the claustrophobia was due to the gold shag carpeting on the living room walls. True, it made the house quite soundproof, and it hadn't kept her from hanging a large gilt mirror on one wall and a family portrait on the other. But walls should not be furry.

The kitchen, thank goodness, was not furry. Down the steps and into the basement we went. There I was greeted with what seemed like a thousand pressure cookers, four stoves, and a million jars of strawberry jam. This year's batch. Okay, maybe not a million jars, but damn, it was a lot of jam.

“Pick a jar,” she said with a wave of her arm, like one of those six-foot-tall models on
The Price Is Right
. She smiled brightly at all of this year's hard work.

I walked over and picked a jar at random, opened it, and looked around for a spoon, which she miraculously produced from thin air. I tasted it, and it was delicious. Just tart enough, but with lots of sweet to go with it. Smooth and fruity.

“Now try the preserves,” she said and pointed to a small stack in the corner. She never made as much preserves as she did jam. I tried a jar of preserves, and it tasted very much like the jam, only with chunks of fruit in it.

“And the jelly?” I asked.

Virgie gave me a disgruntled look. “I'm afraid Krista had to do the jelly. My jelly-making fingers just weren't workin' this year.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering how different her jelly-making fingers were from her jam-making fingers. “Well, I'm sure that's fine.”

Why hadn't I known Krista was making the jelly? It wasn't like me to miss out on that kind of detail.

“Delia made fifty pies, I heard,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Are those to sell or for the pie-eating contest?”

“Delia would not waste her time on pies somebody was going to shove their face into. No, those pies were made by Mrs. Castlereagh.”

The mayor's wife.

“All right,” I said. “Well, it looks like everything's ready to go. Bands will be here on time. Booths have people to work them. I'll see you all this weekend.”

“Here,” Virgie said. She handed me the open jars of jam and preserves and then handed me two more of each, unopened. “You look like you're losin' weight.”

“So I've been told,” I said.

I headed up the steps, with Virgie close behind. When we were at the top of the stairs, she retrieved the jars from me long enough to put them in a plastic bag. “Rudy coming by the usual time to load up the jars?”

“He should be by with the truck about five in the morning on Saturday.”

“Good,” she said. “Take care now.”

“Right,” I said and was escorted out the door.

*   *   *

By the time I arrived home I was weighted down with fudge, jam, preserves, and a half dozen of Tobias's prizewinning roses. Before I could open the door, Rudy opened it for me. “Hi, honey!” He smiled and hugged me while I still stood on the threshold.

“What did you do?” I asked. Normally he stays snug in his recliner. He never meets me at the door.

“I didn't do a blasted thing, for once,” he said.

“What did the kids do?”

“Well…” he said and ushered me inside. “Nothing, really. I mean, Rachel passed out at band camp, but since some cute trumpet player caught her it isn't nearly as much of a tragedy as it would have been.”

“What? Is she okay?”

“She's fine. In fact, since the cute trumpet player caught her, I think she's considering passing out tomorrow, too.”

“Oh, great.”

Rudy continued. “Mary filled Tobias's garden with coffee grounds because she thought it would help his flowers grow—” Rudy looked down at the roses in my hand.

“I guess he's unaware of it so far,” I said.

“She meant well.”

“Where'd she get all the coffee?”

“Well, she took ours and then asked for donations all over town. Turned out she got like fifteen pounds of coffee total.”

“Great,” I said. I was seriously worried about a town of people who would give coffee to a third grader just because she asked for it.

“But, really, that was nothing,” he said and shrugged his shoulders.

I stared at him. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine,” he said.

“You forgot one.”

“Huh?”

“Our son?”

“Oh, Matthew … well, it was nothing overly gross.”

Rudy didn't volunteer any more than that, and frankly I was too tired to care, so I let it go. I put my things down on the kitchen table and rubbed my face with my hands. I was so exhausted. “I'm going to take a shower and go to bed.”

“Go to bed? Honey, it's … seven-thirty.”

“So?”

“So you're the woman who burns the candle at both ends.”

“Well, my candle just met in the middle and burned me. I'm tired,” I said.

Rudy fidgeted with the edge on his pockets. Something was up. I said, “Okay, I don't have time for a bunch of crap, so just tell me what you did so I can berate you and go to bed.”

“I didn't do anything,” he said, gesturing to himself with both hands.

The hair prickled on the back of my neck. “All right, what's going on?”

“Well…” he said, “my mother is coming to town.”

“Oh,” I said. That wasn't so bad. Dinner with her once, maybe a trip to the park for a picnic, and she'd be back to sunny California. As long as there were plenty of other people around at these gatherings, I could live with that. “Great. I'm going to bed now.”

“She hasn't been in town in three years and that's all you can say?”

“That's wonderful, Rudy. What do you want me to say?”

“The woman lives over a thousand miles away.”

“What? You want me to give her a parade? She chose to move to southern California. Why is this such a big deal? I'm happy for you. We'll have a nice visit, you'll actually get to see your sister, who only lives thirty miles away, and all will be well. I'm going to bed.”

“She's staying here.”

I turned deliberately, ever so slowly, so as not to give myself whiplash. “I'm sorry, but I thought you just said something incredibly stupid.”

“She's staying with us.”

“Oh, no, she's not. She's staying with Amy. Like she always does.”

“There is no
always,
” he said. “She's only been here three times in nine years.”

I wasn't sure what his point was, but I kept my silence, afraid that I might actually bark at him if I tried to speak.

“My sister is out of town.”

“Oh, good God!” I yelled. Couldn't help it.

“Torie—”

“There are such things as hotels, you know.”

“She's my mother,” he said.

“She's Cruella De Vil!”

“Torie!” he snapped.

“I cannot believe you would do this. All the things I've got going on right now … I do not—
not
—need this.”

“She'll be good, I promise,” he said.

“You know, Rudy, if you have to promise your mother will be good, she will not be good! What does that say? You have to vouch for the behavior of your mother!”

“She's still my mother,” he said. “She has the right to stay here.”

“You didn't ask me!” I yelled.

“You would have said no,” he said. The veins in his neck began to protrude, like big nightcrawlers beneath his skin.

“You're damn right I would have said no! What is the matter with you?” I screeched.

By this time the children had gathered in the hall, because although Rudy and I disagreed quite often, we rarely screamed at one another.

“What's the matter?” Mary asked.

“Grandma O is coming,” Rachel said.

“Oh,” Mary said, as if that explained it all. “She hates Mother.”

Rachel picked Matthew up, and all three headed back down the hallway to their rooms.

Their interruption gave me a few seconds to calm down, although just barely. “Look,” I said through clenched teeth, “there's only one person in this world who hates me more than your mother, and that's the mayor. But only on good days. And I would never invite him to stay in my home.”

“My mother does not hate you.”

“Your mother hates me. Do you remember the first time I met her? Do you? She called me mountain folk. Remember that? Mountain folk. Or do you have that same disease she does and you conveniently forget when she's been an ass?”

“You're my wife,” he said and tried to hug me.

“Which is why she hates me,” I said, shaking his arm off. “Look, Rudy, I can't deal with this right now. I'll go stay with my mother.”

“You can't go stay with your mother. How would that look?”

“Who cares what it looks like? It didn't bother your mother what it looked like when she told all our wedding guests that our marriage wouldn't last. All of them, Rudy. Even my family.”

“She's apologized for that.”

“Oh, she's a regular Gandhi.”

“It would look really bad, Torie, if you went to stay with your mother, and you know it.”

“Well, it would look even worse if I stayed here and killed her. Just think what that would do to our positions in this town. Me in jail, wearing stripes and … and tracing all the family trees of the inmates for favors. You an outcast from your bowling team. Really, I think I should go stay with my mother.”

“You know, I let your mother live with us,” he said. “The least you can do is play hostess to mine for a few weeks.”

“My mother likes you. My mother doesn't tell you what a terrible person you are because you have lint balls on your socks.
My
mother doesn't ask you how much money you make every time she sees you.
My mother
 … wait, did you say a few weeks?”

He shrugged. “Maybe a month.”

I was going to have a stroke. Which was actually good. Because then I'd be dead and I wouldn't have to worry about killing my mother-in-law.

“You—” I said, pointing my finger at him. I stopped short of calling him any of the names I had on the tip of my tongue. He was my husband, after all, so I had to be careful just what names I did call him. Anything dealing with genetics would be bad, because we had children together. Still, I had to say something. “Slimebucket!”

“Torie! She's my mother, she's coming to stay, and that's all there is to it.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “How did this happen, Rudy? Somewhere in that conversation with your mother it never occurred to you that this would be a bad idea? Or could you just not tell her no?”

That was it. I nailed it. He knew it was a bad idea. He knew his mother couldn't behave. He knew I'd be upset. But he just couldn't tell her no. His eyes told me the whole story. It was funny, though, the fact that he considered himself guilt free in all of this. His mother insisted she come and stay with us, so how could that be his fault? Right?

I was so angry, I couldn't speak, couldn't cry, couldn't do anything but clench my teeth and fists and stomp up the stairs. Throwing myself on the bed, I breathed deeply for a few moments, feeling the poison in my body ebb—the poison that my body seems to make when I argue with my husband. I was going to go to sleep and never wake up. I was just going to hit that snooze button of life until I was eighty and there was no sign of my mother-in-law and the coast was clear. Then I'd get up.