them all more red wine and made a toast, and the whole family ate, spilling sauce all over the tablecloth, which would have driven Weezy nuts if it had been her house, but Maureen didn’t seem to notice or care, and so she relaxed and let herself enjoy the dinner.
IT OCCURRED TO WEEZY, after Max was born, that she now had the exact same family that she’d grown up in—two girls, a year apart, and then a boy. Of course, their baby brother, Jimmy, died when he was just a few weeks old and—this was awful, but true—sometimes she forgot that he’d been there at all.
After he’d died, her father delivered the news, very matter-of-factly. “He went to heaven,” he said one morning. He’d already been to the hospital with Bets and Jimmy in the middle of the night. The girls had never even been woken up. A neighbor was called to come and sit in the house with them.
They’d had a funeral for him, a small and quick ceremony. (“Thank God he was already baptized,” their grandmother kept saying. “That’s why you do it right away. Right away. You don’t waste a second.”) There was a baby picture of him placed alongside pictures of Weezy and Maureen on the side table in the front hall. But he was rarely mentioned.
If that had happened these days, if a baby died, people would talk to the kids. They’d probably be in therapy before the funeral was even planned. But Weezy and Maureen never really talked about Jimmy. They knew it was sad—unthinkable—to lose a baby, and after they’d both had kids they maybe understood that a little bit more. But they didn’t feel the sadness, really. Not the way Bets did. She never talked about it, but something changed in her after that. The pictures before were of her smiling widely with lots of lipstick, and after she looked sharper, and always smiled with her mouth closed.
Bets had always hated Philadelphia, still referred to Michigan as home even after she’d been gone for years. She had met James when he was working in Detroit, and she’d been impressed with his “East Coast ways,” as she always put it. They dated for a few months, and when his company transferred him back to Philadelphia, he’d proposed and she’d accepted.
But she’d never liked the people in Philadelphia; she missed her friends and family back home. She seemed to blame James in some way for taking her there, although Weezy always thought, she’d agreed to go, so she couldn’t really complain. After Jimmy died, it was just one more thing that Bets hated about the place.
When James had a heart attack and died Weezy’s freshman year in college, Bets wasted no time. She packed up the house, sold it, and right after Maureen graduated from high school, she moved back to Michigan. Both Weezy and Maureen thought this was a mistake, and they were devastated at losing their childhood home so soon after losing their father. “She’s not going to be happy there,” they told each other. “She has a memory of it, but it won’t be the same when she gets there.”
But they were wrong. Bets thrived back in Michigan. She reconnected with all of “the gals” she’d known growing up, and it was like she’d never been gone for those twenty years. She had no problem leaving Philadelphia, even if that meant moving away from her children. “That was never my home,” she always said about it, as if all of her time there, raising her children, was just one little pause in her real life.
THEY ALL GOT HOME, STUFFED AND TIRED, and Weezy figured everyone would just go to bed, but Claire announced that she was going over to Lainie’s with Max and Cleo.
“You’re going over now?” Weezy asked. “It’s so late already.”
“Mom, it’s fine. It’s not even that late.”
“What about Martha?”
“What about Martha?” Claire repeated.
“Did you invite her?”
“Yep. I told her we were all going but she wasn’t interested.”
“Well, why don’t you invite her again?”
“Why? She already said no.”
“You know sometimes she needs to be convinced to go somewhere,” Weezy said.
“You want me to go beg Martha to come with me, to a party that she doesn’t want to go to?”
“Claire.” Weezy gave her a look, and Claire let out a sigh, but she went upstairs, and returned with Martha in tow. The four of them headed out the door and Weezy called, “Have a good time!”
Weezy settled herself on