He said: Grandma. Her name is Anne. That’s all. Not angry — flat, and loud enough to reach the far end of a room with sixty people in it. The woman I’d never met looked at her shoes. Somebody’s chair creaked. My mother-in-law laughed and said something about him being very serious tonight, and my son said, Her name is Anne, again, exactly the same way, and waited.
Nobody rescued her. That’s the part I keep going back to. Nineteen years of a room that laughed on cue, and when the laugh didn’t come the second time, the whole thing just stood there in the open where everyone could see the shape of it. She said well and turned to the woman and said my name, properly, for what I believe is the first time in front of company since 2006. Then my son picked his glass back up and asked his uncle about the drive from Erie.
He came out to the car with me afterward. He said he’d been rehearsing that in his head since he was about seventeen and had never been able to work out a version that didn’t turn into a fight, and then he’d realized he didn’t need to argue with her — he just needed to make her say my name. He said the joke only worked because it was faster than my name. Take away the speed and there’s nothing there.
She hasn’t done it since April. She hasn’t apologized either, and I’ve stopped expecting it, and I’ve discovered I don’t need it nearly as much as I assumed I did. In July, at my niece’s christening, she introduced me to a neighbor as my son’s wife, Anne, and my son wasn’t even in the room. And in June, at a restaurant, in front of eleven relatives, I ordered dessert and ate all of it, and my daughter kicked me under the table exactly once.
