right here, ready to help,” Claire said. She smelled like liquor and cigarettes, and she stood on the other side of the kitchen so that Weezy wouldn’t notice.
Weezy went back to stirring the stuffing, sighing as though Claire had just caused a huge inconvenience. The stuffing was in three different pots, each one overflowing, little stale bread pieces jumping onto the counter at random. “I just wish you hadn’t stayed out all night. We’ve got a big day.”
“I’m fine,” Claire said. She was reminded of the recurring fight that she and Weezy had had after every grade school sleepover. Claire would get angry, Weezy would accuse her of being tired, and then Claire would scream that she wasn’t tired, and then Weezy would threaten that she’d never go to another sleepover again.
All Claire wanted was to go to her room and lie down just for a minute, but Bets was in her room, probably going through her drawers, and snooping through her things. There had been some issues with the sleeping arrangements. Normally, Max stayed in the basement and Bets stayed in his room, but with Cleo here, they needed an extra place for her, so Claire was sent packing to Martha’s room, which had twin beds, Cleo took Max’s room, and Bets got Claire’s room. No one was happy.
Claire grabbed a bagel from the counter, spread it with cream cheese, and ate it in huge, quick bites. She hoped that it would make her feel better. She headed upstairs to take a shower, but Martha was in the bathroom, so she lay down on one of the twin beds and waited.
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