She asks me to drive, which means she must assume my role as guardian of the cupcakes. Anna volunteered to bring dessert and has baked four giant cupcakes, each of our individual favorites with our names frosted on top. My dad will get the carrot cake he adores, and my mother a kind of blueberry muffin made from soy flour. For herself and me, she prepared something far more decadent, these giant killer double chocolate chip balls. She grips the plate from both sides in her lap and positions the quart of ice cream she bought for a la mode between her feet.
"Can I beg one thing," she says as I'm about to trigger the ignition. "Don't leave me alone with either one of them. Okay? I'm not in the mood for any heart-to-hearts. Just tell me to go upstairs and look at your room. Something like that to get me out of the way. Okay?"
"Okay." She has actually made this request several times before.
In a few minutes, we are at the house in which I grew up. These days, every time I arrive it looks different to me-smaller, quainter, a little like something from a fairy tale. It's an odd structure to start, the kind of thing my mom would pick, with weeping mortar and this supersteep roof, a style that doesn't seem to match the abundant flowers that remain in bloom in urns and pots in front. All the time I was growing up, my mom said she couldn't wait to move back to the city, but when my dad proposed it a couple years ago, she'd changed her mind. The fact they're still here reflects the enduring stalemate between them. She wins. He resents it.
My mom sweeps the door open before we even set foot on the stoop. She's wearing a little makeup and one of these waffle-fabric athletic suits, which is pretty much dressed up for her when she's at home. She hugs me and then raves about the baked goods as she accepts the plate from Anna, kissing her cheek breezily in the process. She apologizes as soon as we are through the door. My dad and she have been working in the garden all day, and they are running behind.
"I sent your father to the store, Nat. He'll be right back. Come in. Anna, can I get you anything to drink?"
I've told Anna that my mom likes red wine, and she bought a fancy bottle, but my mom decides to save it for dinner. Anna and I each take a beer from the fridge for now.
My mom's moods are so unpredictable that often when I'm headed out here to visit, I will call my dad's cell to discuss her as if she is a weather balloon. 'Bad day,' my dad will warn me. 'Lower than catfish crap.' But she is rarely as visibly excited as she seems tonight, dashing around the kitchen. Hyper is not usually in her emotional range.
Anna has never been here before. My mom really doesn't open the house to anyone but family, and I show Anna the living and family rooms, identifying all my now dead grandparents and my cousins in their photographs and letting her poke me about all my little-kid pictures. Eventually, we rejoin my mom in the kitchen.
"It's simple," my mom says about dinner, "just like I promised. Steak. Corn. Salad. Anna's cupcakes. Maybe with a little ice cream." She smiles, a cholesterol nut relishing the thought of being evil.
Together Anna and I take on the salad. A knockout cook, Anna has started on a dressing, using olive oil and lemon, when my dad comes in with several plastic bags bearing the orange logo of Mega-Drugs. He thunks them down on the counter, extends his hand to Anna, and then gives me a quick hug.
"I never would have predicted this," he says, motioning to the two of us. "It makes too much sense."
We all laugh, then my mom makes my dad look at the stuff Anna baked. He chips a tiny bit of frosting off her muffin. Anna and my mom both cry out at once.
"Hey, that's mine," my mother tells him.
"You have the longest name," my father points out.
My dad is limping as he moves around the kitchen, and I ask how his back is.
"Rotten at the moment. Your mother had me digging for her new rhododendron all afternoon."
"Here," my mother answers. "Take your Advil and stop complaining. The exercise is good for you. Between the campaign and George Mason's rotator cuff, I don't think you've had any kind of workout all month." My dad normally plays handball a couple times a week with Judge Mason, and he does look a little softer than usual. He puts the pills my mom hands him on the counter, then disappears into the family room and comes back with a glass of wine for her.
"Did you remember the appetizers?" she asks as he's in the fridge, taking a beer for himself.
"Yes, horse deserves," he declares, a rotten joke he has made since I was a boy. He bought aged cheddar and Genoa salami, family favorites, although my mom will not eat much of that. She loves the pickled herring he brought home, but she'll have only a piece or two because the salt is bad for her blood pressure, so my dad has also come back with yogurt, which he mixes with onion soup to make a dip, while Anna and I set out the carrots and celery that were already in the refrigerator, as well as the other items my father got.
As we are all toiling, my mom questions Anna about work and then with no apparent segue about her family.
"Only child," she explains.
"Like Nat. That's probably an important thing to have in common."
Anna is chopping onion for the salad, which has brought a dribble from her eyes, and she makes a joke of it.
"It wasn't that bad of a childhood," she says.
The three of us laugh uproariously at the remark. Now that it's actually happening, Anna seems to be doing fine. I understand. Every spring for more years than I could count, I was convinced I would never remember how to hit a baseball and found myself amazed the first time I felt the buzz of solid contact and heard the ringing of the bat.
Anna diverts further inquiries by asking my father about the campaign.
Cutting more salami, he says, "I'm pretty sick of hearing about John Harnason."
My mom turns from the counter to shoot my dad a look. "We should never have had to go through any of this," she says. "Never."
I catch Anna's eye to warn her, as I should have before, about this subject.
My dad says, "It'll be over soon, Barbara."
"Not soon enough. Your father hasn't slept through the night all month."
She enjoys this role, telling on my dad, and he turns away, knowing better than to risk further comment. I thought my father's nights as an insomniac were long past. When I was a boy, there were periods when he was up, roaming the house. I would sometimes hear him and was actually comforted to know he was awake, able to dispel the nighttime spooks and demons I feared. Listening, watching now, I can feel that the weight of the household is different in some minute way. The campaign seems to have brought the usual silent conflicts between my parents more into the open.
Accustomed to my mother's criticisms, my father offers her the appetizer platter, which he and Anna and I seem to be doing a good job of hogging down. Then my dad takes the steaks out of the fridge and begins to season them. He needs more garlic powder, he says, and heads down to the basement to bring it up.
"Boys cook?" my dad asks me when he's ready to face the fire.
"Mom, you mind if Anna looks around upstairs while we're out there? I wanted her to see my room."
"Anything you like up there, Anna, feel free. Nat won't let me throw away a thing. Don't you think a shelf full of baseball trophies is just what your new place needs?"
We all laugh again. It's hard to tell if this jolliness is nerves or actual enjoyment, but it's uncharacteristic for the home in which I was raised. Out of sight of anybody else, Anna rolls her eyes at me from the staircase, while I follow my dad out to the porch. The sun is setting, falling into the river in a vivid display of colors, and there is a little fall coolness to the air.
My dad and I play with the knobs until the barbecue is ignited, and we stand there watching the flames spread between the burners as if it were a religious rite. When I was a child, my mom always surrounded me in a way that didn't seem to require words, and maybe as a result I have never gotten the knack of talking to my dad. Of course, I didn't really talk all that much to anybody before Anna, which must mean something, I guess. Naturally, my dad and I have conversations, but they are usually to the point, unless we are talking about law or the Trappers, the two subjects where we are liable to become animated together. Usually my principal communion with my father comes, like now, from coexistence, breathing the same air, firing off occasional comments about the flames or the way the meat is sizzling.