Stories

She Thought My Mom’s Country House Was Her Personal Resort—Until I Set One Firm Rule!

AQBy Avery QuinnNovember 9, 202641 min read

“Don’t you tell me to sit down either, Susan,” Mom said.

Susan froze. With a stack of plates in her hands.

And for the first time all day, I almost laughed.

Susan caught herself.

“Right,” she said. “Right. I’m sorry.”

She stood there holding the plates against her chest.

“Maggie,” she said carefully. “Would you like to help? With the dishes?”

My mother thought about it.

She really thought about it. I watched her think.

“No,” she said.

“Okay,” Susan said.

And she carried the dishes into the kitchen by herself.

That night, I found my mother on the deck. Alone. After everybody else had gone to bed.

She was sitting in the plastic chair in the corner. By her flower boxes. Looking at the lake. The moon was out. The water was silver.

I sat down next to her.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “For what I said this morning. About being everybody’s maid. That was mean.”

“It was a little mean,” she agreed.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know you didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “But it was also a little true.”

We sat there. The loon called again. Somewhere far out on the water.

“Your father would have hated this summer,” Mom said suddenly.

I looked at her.

“He would have hated watching me do all that,” she said. “Every weekend. He used to say I’d give away my own shoes if somebody said they liked them. He used to take things out of my hands. Not to do them for me. Just to make me stop. He’d take the dish towel and hide it.”

She laughed. A little.

“He hid a lot of dish towels,” she said. “I found one in the tackle box once. Three years after he died.”

I took her hand.

“I miss him,” she said.

“I know, Mom. I do too.”

The next morning, I came downstairs at seven.

Mom was already up. Sitting at the kitchen table. In her robe. With a cup of coffee she’d made just for herself. Reading her mystery novel. She was on page eighty-four.

The kitchen was quiet.

And in the sink, there was a coffee cup. Rinsed out. Upside down.

Susan’s coffee cup. The white one with the gold rim that she always uses.

She’d already been down. She’d made her own coffee. And she’d brought her cup in from the deck and rinsed it out and put it in the sink.

I didn’t say anything about it.

Neither did my mother.

We just looked at each other. And she smiled. And went back to her book.

Richard went to town for groceries that morning. By himself. He came back with a whole bag full of stuff. Including the regular mayonnaise.

“Susan said it’s fine,” he said, putting it in the refrigerator. “She said she was being silly. About the avocado stuff.”

He held up another jar. A glass one.

“I also got her one of these,” he said sheepishly. “Just in case.”

Before they left on Sunday afternoon, Susan went looking for my mother.

She found her on the deck. In the plastic chair in the corner. Still next to the flower boxes.

I stayed in the kitchen. Close enough to hear through the open sliding door. I didn’t pretend I wasn’t listening.

Susan stood there for a moment. She looked at the geraniums. The six blue boxes. The bright red flowers. Sitting in the corner by the trash cans.

“Maggie,” Susan said. “I’m sorry. About those. The flowers.”

My mother didn’t say anything.

“I shouldn’t have told you to move them,” Susan said. “It’s your house. It was a terrible thing to say. I don’t even know why I said it.”

My mother looked up at her.

“No,” Mom said quietly. “You shouldn’t have.”

And Susan accepted that.

She didn’t make any excuses. She didn’t say I was tired or I didn’t mean it like that or I was just joking. She didn’t give a big speech. She didn’t explain.

She just stood there. And she took it.

Then she looked at the flowers again. For a long moment.

“They are pretty,” she said.

My mother smiled.

“I know,” she said.

Daniel was loading our bags into the car out front.

Susan walked back through the kitchen on her way out. With her purse over her shoulder and her sunglasses on her head.

She stopped at the kitchen table.

She looked at the dry-erase board.

I’d already wiped it clean that morning. For next weekend. It was blank again. White and empty.

Susan picked up the black marker from the little ledge at the bottom.

For a second, I thought she was going to write something mean. Or erase the whole thing. Or make some kind of joke.

Instead, she uncapped the marker.

And at the top of the blank board, in neat, careful handwriting, she wrote:

Susan — Saturday breakfast.

She capped the marker. She put it back on the ledge.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at me.

She just walked out the front door.

On her way to the car, she walked past the deck.

Past the big lounger with the striped cushion. The one in the middle of the deck. With the best view of the water. The one she’d been lying in all summer.

She paused next to it.

She looked at the lounger.

Then she looked at the corner of the deck. At the six blue boxes of red geraniums.

Then she did something I’ll never forget.

She walked over to the corner. She picked up one of the flower boxes. With both hands. It was heavy. Full of wet dirt.

She carried it across the deck. And she set it back on the railing. Right in front of the lounger. Right where my mother had put it.

Then she went back and got another one.

And another one.

She moved all six of them. By herself. Back to the railing. Every single one.

She was out of breath when she was done. Her white linen cover-up had dirt on it.

My mother was standing in the sliding glass door. Watching. With her hand over her mouth.

Susan brushed off her hands.

Then she looked at the lounger. At the view of the lake. At the six boxes of red geraniums blocking part of it.

She didn’t say a word.

She just picked up a plastic chair from the corner. And she moved it to the other end of the deck. Where you could see the whole lake. Past the flowers.

And she sat down in it. For just a minute. To look at the water.

Then she got up and walked to the car.

My mom noticed.

So did I.

I set my alarm for five o’clock that Sunday morning because I thought I needed to teach my mother-in-law a lesson. That nobody was there to serve her. That my mother wasn’t the hired help.

And I did. I think she learned it.

But that wasn’t the only thing that changed that weekend.

My mom stopped treating every visit like a test she had to pass.

The next weekend, she made breakfast on Sunday. Because she wanted to. Not because anybody expected it. Susan made breakfast on Saturday, like she wrote on the board. Scrambled eggs. Less dry this time. She’d watched a video, she told us.

The weekend after that, Mom and Susan made dinner together. Mom taught Susan how to make her pot roast. They stood side by side at the stove in the orange-countertop kitchen, arguing about how much garlic to use.

“More,” Mom said.

“That’s already a lot.”

“More, Susan.”

Susan put in more.

It was the best pot roast I’d ever had.

Susan started carrying her own plate. Every meal. Without anybody looking at her. She started asking before she expected something. Maggie, would it be okay if I took the kayak out? Maggie, do you mind if I use the last of the coffee?

She started doing just enough work to understand how much had always been happening around her. How much my mother had been carrying. All summer. Every weekend.

On the last weekend in August, when we closed up the cabin for the season, Susan got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the bathroom floor.

Nobody asked her to.

She just did it.

When she was done, she stood up, and her knees cracked, and she said, “Good Lord. You do this every single week, Maggie?”

“Every single week,” Mom said.

Susan looked at her for a long moment.

“You’re a saint,” she said. “Or crazy. One of the two.”

“Probably both,” Mom said.

They both laughed.

And I learned something too.

I learned that defending my mother didn’t mean I had to fight every single battle for her. It didn’t mean yelling at Susan. It didn’t mean making a scene. It didn’t mean ruining thirty Christmases.

Sometimes I just had to get up at five o’clock in the morning with a dry-erase marker.

Sometimes I just had to make enough room for her to finally say no.

And then step back.

And let her say it.

We went up to the lake again last weekend. The first weekend of the new summer.

My mother had already planted her geraniums. Six blue boxes. Bright red flowers.

The dry-erase board was on the kitchen table when we got there. Propped against the fruit bowl.

At the top, in my mother’s handwriting, it said WEEKEND JOBS.

Underneath, there were five names. Everybody had a job. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, groceries, cleanup. Rotating.

At the bottom, next to her own name, my mother had written:

Maggie: Sunday breakfast. And enjoy my house.

She’d underlined my. Twice.

The geraniums stayed exactly where she planted them.

All summer.

And every morning, when Susan came out on the deck with her coffee, she walked right past the big lounger with the striped cushion. And she sat in the plastic chair at the end of the deck. Where you can see the whole lake.