Barbara Callahan - My Mother's Keeper

He jumped up when he saw us, sending the fork to the floor. He ignored it and pulled out a chair for Mother and one for me. When we were seated, he rubbed his hands together and smiled. I shuddered. Bad people in movies rub their hands together when they smile before they shoot, stab, or poison someone.

When the waiter came over to give Bill another fork, he ordered wine for Mother and himself and a Coke for me. He remembered what I like to drink from the pre-confessional days. Before the drinks came, he asked me how school was going and how my basketball team was doing. I answered “fine” and “good.” Mother looked embarrassed. He frowned and made his caterpillar eyebrows do the tricks that used to make me laugh.

As soon as the waiter put the glasses in front of us, Bill said he’d better clear the air before we had our dinners.

“Catherine, let me begin by saying that I did not murder my cousin, although I did say that to Father Dennehy in confession.”

He paused to wait for a question from me. I didn’t like the way he was speaking in riddles and I knew he wanted me to ask him to explain, but I didn’t want to so I just sipped my Coke.

He sighed and spilled it out. “When I found out Friday night that Tim had died from a fall, I went to the shop to check something out, something I should have done, but forgot to do. Before I left at five forty-five, I meant to clean up some oil that I had spilled near the lift, but I was anxious to get to the bank with the week’s deposits before it closed and I forgot about the spill.

“When I got the call from the police that night, I rushed back and sure enough, Tim had slipped on the oil I forgot about and cracked his head on the concrete floor. I almost went out of my mind. The police called my doctor and he gave me pills so I could pull myself together. Of course, they didn’t help. The next day, Saturday, I wanted to die. I explained it all to Tim’s wife and she told me it wasn’t my fault.

“I still couldn’t forgive myself, so I decided to ask God’s forgiveness. I went into the confessional and blurted out that I had murdered my cousin. Father Dennehy took me to the rectory and let me tell him all the circumstances. Then he explained that it was an accident, that I hadn’t sinned because I hadn’t intended it to happen.”

His eyes filled with tears. Mother reached over and squeezed his hand.

He dabbed his eyes with a napkin. “Do you understand now, Catherine, why the person who heard me misunderstood?”

Once more he waited for me to speak. Yes, I told him, and sort of believed him because he wasn’t smiling or rubbing his hands together.

I was quiet during dinner, but I am always quiet, even when Grandmother isn’t around. I got even quieter after dinner when the waiter brought a silver tray to our table with a beautiful white rose draped over it. The rose had a pink ribbon around its stem and something sparkly tied to it. Bill took the rose and handed it to Mother. She sniffed it and smiled and then noticed the ring on the ribbon. Right at the table Bill asked her to marry him after he untied the ring and slid it onto her finger. She nodded yes.

“I wanted you to be here when we became engaged, Catherine, to let you know that you will be an important part of our marriage.”

“And you’ll be the maid of honor, too,” said Mother.

This is not real, I told myself, it’s a play. But I smiled because it was my part in the play. I didn’t have to say any lines because Mother and Bill know that I am quiet, very, very quiet.

When Mother showed Grandmother her ring, she got quiet for a while before she asked where we were going to live after the marriage.

“At Bill’s house, of course. He’s going to redo a room for Catherine and let her pick out the furniture and everything.”

Grandmother stared at the floor for a minute and when she looked up, her eyes were watery. “Well, it’s your life,” she said and shuffled down the hallway to the kitchen.

Mother watched her go and said the unbelievable. “She’s going to miss us, you know.”

I was too shocked to say anything.

But I had a lot to say the next day at school to Mary Anne. I told her I wanted to make up so we walked home together. I told her about Bill and how he had confessed something he didn’t mean to do, so that Father Dennehy had to explain in the rectory that he hadn’t sinned, and how he and my mother were going to get married and how I was trying to get used to thinking of him as a stepfather and not a murderer, but it just wasn’t working. I just couldn’t get happy about it, but I didn’t know why.

Mary Anne put on her smartest-kid-in-the-class look, the one she wears after she gets a perfect test paper in math. “That’s because you’ve had your mother all to yourself all these years and now you have to share her with somebody else.”

I wanted to push her into the garden at the House of Usher and claw her smirky face with dead vines. Sure she was right about me wanting Mother to myself. I’d figured that out already, but there was something else that was trying to scratch its way out of my memory, something else that was trying to tell me that I should be worried about Bill.

I gave her a dirty look and she looked ashamed and started talking about our homework assignment for Religion class. We had to pick one of the Sacraments and write an essay about it.

“I’m picking Penance,” she said, “and I’m going to write about Overscrupulous Consciences, about people confessing to things that aren’t sins, like missing Mass on Sunday during a blizzard or to murder, like Bill Gordon did, even though it wasn’t.”

Suddenly she stopped walking and turned to me. “I just remembered something. Bill Gordon is a perfect example for my essay, but I won’t use his real name. I overheard my mother telling my father that Bill was terribly upset for the longest time after his wife died. His sister-in-law told Mother that he felt responsible, that he couldn’t forgive himself for not tacking down the hallway carpet and replacing the light bulb in the hall. His wife fell down the steps one early morning in the winter when it was still dark. He found her dead at the bottom of the stairs. And now he feels guilty about his cousin. Such a terrible coincidence, my mother said. Such an overscrupulous conscience.”

And that’s what I was trying to remember, what Grandmother said about his first wife: “She was young when she died five years ago. Fell down the stairs. He probably pushed her.”

After leaving Mary Anne, I made a vow that there wouldn’t be any more coincidences. There’s no point in telling Mother, because she’s too much in love with him to believe that he would arrange his wife’s death. She will think that I am making up things to make her change her mind, because she can tell I’m not happy about the wedding. But there is something I can do. I have to thank Grandmother’s hurting head, hurting knees, hurting stomach for making me so quiet. After the wedding, when we move into Bill’s house, I will train myself to wake up before everyone else and check the hallway carpet and light fixture, and the kitchen floor for any oily spills. I can do this without waking him up because I am quiet, very, very quiet.