Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Also on the menu, Dolly’s cinnamony roast chicken with green mashed potatoes called hushweh — try them, try them! Baked with herbs and juices from the bird. She began to relax regarding the E. coli, if not the mad-cow … whatever happened to that, anyway? Perhaps it was implicated in the epidemic in dementia — unless the spike was simply an effect of mass longevity. No doubt it would soon have its own ribbon. A grey one.

“Do you want the other wing?” Duncan asked, indicating their glasses, half rising.

“Sure. I’ll get it.”

She rose and carried their glasses over to the kitchen.

“I bought the chicken,” Dolly announced balefully.

“You’re falling down on the job, Missus,” said Duncan, mock stern.

“I better watch out or he’ll fire me.” Dolly winked at Hilary, who was crouched before the open fridge. “What are you looking for, dear?”

“The olives,” said Hil.

“They’re in a Becel tub.”

Hil stayed staring.

“It’s Yoplait on the bottom.”

There ought to be a sign over her mother’s fridge: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here . Dolly had reused and recycled long before it was fashionable or urgent. A tin of Hershey’s chocolate sauce might contain solidified bacon fat; raw egg yolks nested in a Cool Whip tub, and God knows what’s in the Nutella jar; she would have purchased the original products exactly once. By the time you got through the decoys, you’d forgotten what you were looking for.

Mary Rose asked, “Matthew, what are you eating?”

He had a chocolate moustache.

“Nutella on a cracker,” said Dolly. “It’s healthy, they eat it in Europe.”

“So that’s what was in the Nutella jar.”

“What else would it be?”

Maggie was now surrounded by the contents of Dolly’s purse, which was capsized like a tugboat amid bobbing cargo. Mary Rose was about to step around her when she noticed the child was playing with a plastic pill container — the rectangular kind with the days of the week stamped on the compartments. She bent and took it from her. “Mine!” objected Maggie.

A whistling from the stove. Dolly poured boiling water into a waiting bowl of pink Jell-O crystals, picked it up and swung it with its scalding contents from counter to table. Mary Rose scooped Maggie from the floor—“Here, Hil”—and thrust the thrashing child at her.

She moved to rejoin her father with the drinks but Dolly was right on her heels. She groaned, saying, “I’m going to go take a suppository.”

“I now know that,” said Mary Rose. “And cannot now unknow it.”

“You’re saucy.” Dolly pretended to slap her. “Have you heard from your brother?”

“Not recently.”

“When’s he coming home?”

“I don’t know.”

Dolly smiled mischievously. “Do you think he and Shereen will have a baby?”

“I don’t know.” She meant to sip but gulped and coughed.

“When’re we going to play Scrabble?”

“We can play now. Do you ever use the German Scrabble game I gave you?”

“Do you remember what you said when I told you we were going to call him Alexander—”

“Yes, Mum, I—”

“Hilary, do you know what she said, dear, when Andy-Patrick was born? I said to her, ‘Mary Rose, will we call the baby Alexander?’ And she said, “ ‘Don’t call him Alexander. If you call him Alexander, you’ll have to put him in de gwound!’ ”

Hil shot Mary Rose a questioning look — she didn’t know it was a funny story. Don’t even try, Hil .

“I’m surprised you remember that, Mary Rose,” said Dolly, “you were only, how old were you?”

“Five.”

“I mean when Alexander was born.”

“Oh, I … I guess I actually don’t know.”

Dolly was suddenly shouting again, firing the words past Mary Rose’s head. She felt them graze her scalp—“Dunc, how old was Mary Rose when Alexander-Who-Died was born?!”

“What?” he answered irritably. “What’re you worried about that for?”

“I’m not ‘worried,’ Dunc!” And to Hil, “She would have been, let me think now …”

“Where’s that picture, Mum? The one of us visiting his grave.”

“Was there a picture?”

“Dad took it, remember?” She looked over at her father for corroboration but he appeared to be dozing off. She set his drink down at his elbow and removed the cup and saucer. She returned to her mother, speaking quietly. “It’s of me and you and Maureen. It was cold, you gave me your sweater.”

“It wasn’t cold, it was April.”

“See, you do remember.”

Matthew piped up, “Jitdy, can I have some ice cream?”

“Shh, Matthew.”

“Sure,” replied Dunc, rallying, hands on the armrests, about to rise.

“No, Dad, not yet, please.”

He winked at Matthew. “She’s the boss. Come here, Matt, and keep me company while the women finish making supper. Did you know all the best chefs in the world are men?”

“I was going to do something, now what was it?” said Dolly.

“Solve Fermat’s Last Theorem?”

“I was going to take a suppository, come.”

“I am not going into the bathroom with you.”

“You’re saucy, come with me now, I want to give you something.”

She topped up her Scotch again and followed her mother into her bedroom where Dolly started going through her jewellery box. Mary Rose braced herself — what was her mother about to bestow upon her? A diamond? A dime-store bracelet? Would she be able to tell the difference?

Dolly had moved on to a bottom drawer in her dresser and now she threw something at Mary Rose with a flapping sound. A calendar. “He painted the whole thing with his foot!”

“Really. What happened to his arms?”

“What was I going to give you?” Dolly dropped her arms to her sides with a jangle of bangles. “Golly Moses, Mary Roses, your mother’s losin’ ’er mind.”

This was not different. The confusion, the juggling act. There was no new ingredient, just an old one missing: anger. Like a maze without a minotaur.

“It’s okay, Mum.”

From the living room came the velvet tones of Nat King Cole posing the age-old question to Mona Lisa. As though summoned, Dolly left the room. Mary Rose followed to see her father dancing a slow, bouncy circle with Maggie in his arms — the child had one hand on his shoulder and the other fastened round his thumb. She was gazing at him with a gravity and contentment that Mary Rose recognized, and she paused, held, too, by the evening light that had inhabited the room. Splendid. Impossible to believe that light could be anything but particulate, so thick and honey-sweet it was, light reflecting light, pouring through the glass doors, suffusing the room with an aching loveliness, rendering the moment at once immortal and irretrievably lost. The song ended, he set her down, and Mary Rose watched as Maggie made a run for the sun.

“Maggie!”—Mary Rose caught her round the middle before she could bang into the glass, and the child screamed in protest.

“Gently!” cried Duncan, his voice reedy with alarm.

Mary Rose set Maggie down and tapped on the glass to show her the door was closed.

“Is she all right?”

She turned. Her father was white as paper.

“She’s fine, Dad.”

“Don’t be getting after her now.” His voice had splintered to a whisper.

“I’m not, Dad, I’m not angry at her.”

“All right, then, no paneek.” He turned to his CD tower.

“Are you okay, Dad?”

He cleared his throat. “Oh I’m fine, it’s just you’ve got to be careful when you grab hold of a child like that.”

“Golly Moses,” said Dolly. “I thought she was going to run right off the balcony.”