“Slow down, sweetheart!” my mother-in-law laughed. “You’re getting a little too curvy!”
A few relatives laughed with her.
My son, Oliver, froze with his hand halfway to the cake plate.
He’s seven. He was wearing the green dinosaur shirt he’d picked out himself that morning because he said it was “fancy.” He’d combed his own hair with water. He had been waiting all evening for that cake.
He looked around the table at all the faces. Twenty of them. Aunts, uncles, cousins, Patricia’s friends from church. Some of them were still smiling.
Then, slowly, he lowered his arm.
“Grandma,” he said, “I’m not fat.”
His voice was so quiet I barely heard it over the clinking forks.
He tugged the bottom of his shirt down over his stomach and held it there with both hands.
Patricia laughed again. She was wearing a gold paper crown one of the grandkids had made her, and it tipped to the side when she threw her head back.
“Oh, honey, look at that belly! You look six months pregnant!”
This time, Oliver didn’t answer.
He just looked down at the cake he hadn’t touched.
And I saw his little fingers tighten around the hem of his shirt until his knuckles went white.
I should explain something before I go any further.
Until a few months before that dinner, Oliver loved visiting his grandmother more than almost anywhere else in the world.
More than the park. More than the pool. More than the dinosaur museum two hours away that we’d taken him to twice.
If you asked him on a Friday night what he wanted to do tomorrow, he’d say, “Grandma’s,” before you even finished the question.
Patricia lived twenty minutes from us, in the same yellow house on Hawthorne Street where my husband David grew up. She’d been a widow for four years, since David’s dad, Frank, died of a stroke. The house was too big for her, and too quiet, and full of furniture that smelled like lemon polish.
In the front room, beside the big bay window, there was an old blue armchair. It was wide and soft, with a dent in the seat that was exactly the shape of Patricia. Nobody else sat in it. Not even Frank, when he was alive.
Except Oliver.
