Jeanine DeHoney fiction short story Sunday Supper

Sunday Supper

by Jeanine DeHoney

Richard is our only child. And before the incident that altered his relationship with her, he used to be Great Aunt Joan’s beloved nephew. She, who chose not to have children of her own as she traveled the world and ran a PR company, doted on my husband Theo from the time he was born to her younger sister, Theo’s mother Beatrice; and she did the same once Richard was born.

She took Richard to baseball games, wrestling matches, to the finest restaurants, and filled his room with mementos from her travels. I could never find fault with her as a great aunt. She was one of the best. It is now I find fault with her; her and Theo. They have forgotten what it is to be young and reckless. They have forgotten what it is to make terrible mistakes because you don’t think things through, nothing as awful as hurting someone physically or taking someone’s life, but something that you later have remorse for and try with every breath you have to redeem yourself.  

If my mother-in-law Beatrice was alive, if cancer hadn’t riddled her body, she would have sat Theo and Great Aunt Joan down, got really close to their faces, wagged her thin finger near their noses and said, “Cut out the BS you two, y’all were no angels so give him some grace.”

I know she would have reminded Theo that when he was sixteen, she had to put him in boot camp to curb his behavior, although I only heard slivers about Great Aunt Joan, that she had some affair with some married member of some royal family, but I never heard the full narrative. Both she and Theo kept her discretion close to their chest.  

Beatrice never cursed like most people did. She abbreviated her curse words with letters. She could throw out an “Oh S,” or “F it,” or “What a D shame,” but not the full curse word, whenever she was watching something on the news that upset her. She would have definitely cornered Theo and Great Aunt Joan and talked some alphabetic sense into them, her way.   

“Richard was wrong for sure, but he can’t undo what he did,” I like to envision Beatrice telling Theo and Great Aunt Joan, “Now either you’re going to D-it forgive him or you’re going to make him suffer for the rest of his life. But I tell you if you do…you’ll regret it, D…, for the rest of yours.”

Beatrice was a firecracker. That’s why I always thought she’d beat cancer; she was such a fighter. She was a good mother-in-law too. Loved me just as my mother did when she was alive. If only she was here now, I thought as I placed platters of food on the table. We would be a tag team.   

Richard should be here too. Seated to the right of me, where he always sits at our cherry wood dining table for Sunday supper. What he did wasn’t worthy of Theo banning him from our home or for Great Aunt Joan to melodramatically clutch her chest as if she was going to have a heart attack whenever I said his name, which I was tempted to do —not out of spite, but as his mother, I could say his name if I D-well wanted to. Ha ha, Beatrice, had me cussing like you.  

So, I did. I exhaled deeply and said Richard’s name as I placed my napkin-lined wicker basket full of buttermilk biscuits in the middle of our dining table. Richard would have grabbed two right away, before we blessed the food, when they were steaming hot and waiting for a chunk of butter, and I would have playfully slapped his hand. 

Richard has been gone for three months. Tonight, it is just as it has been for every Sunday supper since then: just me, Theo, and Great Aunt Joan. 

I start humming softly as I walk into the kitchen to get the rest of our supper. I always tend to hum when I am anxious.

***

Theo and I had Richard late in life. I was forty. He was forty-three. I was a high school math teacher. Theo an engineer. We never planned on starting a family; we were happy. Just the two of us…until one day we both decided that something was missing from our lives, like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle we needed to complete it, to complete us. Besides me being on bedrest my last trimester, Richard was perfect when he was born. Theo cried when he first held him. I cried watching Theo cry.  

Richard was a good kid. We were never called to his school for any problems, he was never truant, he even joined the music club in Middle school and played the trumpet. He said he wanted to be a trumpeter like Wynton Marsalis. Great Aunt Joan even got tickets for him to see him in concert at Lincoln Center. He couldn’t stop talking about it for a week. 

I thought that my pain as a parent would come only when Richard left the nest. Not that I wouldn’t want him to spread his wings full breadth, but I would miss him. And that maternal aching would be one close to my bosom until it stabilized and became just a murmur of aching and I accepted that this was the way things were supposed to be. The son we raised leaving to find his own way in life…in love. And then it would be Theo and I, our time, us growing old setting off on our own journey of reawakening as a middle-aged couple. I never thought that pain would come from Richard stealing something; how everything would unravel after that.

***

Great Aunt Joan has been a fixture at our Sunday suppers since their inception when Richard was a baby. I wanted to start the same Sunday supper tradition my mother started when I was a little girl. Then food was scarce because my father worked in construction and on off seasons it was just my librarian mother’s salary, but we always made do, even if it was a pot of field peas and rice and skillet cornbread.

While my mother would soak her feet in a basin of warm water with Epson salts in their bedroom, I’d set the table, one my frugal mother drove a U-Haul truck to pick up from one of her co-worker’s home and then got four neighborhood teenage boys to bring it upstairs to our apartment because my father wasn’t home. 

She gave them a cold Orange Crush soda, a bologna sandwich and five dollars to split and told them if they had any library books out that were late, to bring them to her and not worry about paying any late fees.

At that table I listened with a mouth full of food as my father told the funniest jokes, and my mother told us how many times she had to shush people for talking too loud at the library. I took it all in, until it was my turn to talk about anything I wanted, until our plates were empty after the last clink of our forks. 

That was what I wanted for Richard. To feel that love around a family meal especially during Sunday supper when I pulled out all of the stops when it came to our meal. Sunday suppers were collard greens, and chicken and dumplings, and baked chicken and butter beans and honey cornbread and buttery flaky biscuits and freshly squeezed lemonade and so much more. Food for the soul. I wanted Richard to have that indelible memory. 

Tonight, we’re having meatloaf, garlic potatoes, and string beans along with my buttermilk biscuits. If Richard was here, he would eat at least three biscuits split open and slathered in butter. 

I’ve made Richard’s favorite foods each week ever since he left and moved in with a friend. The first week he was gone I made chicken and dumplings. As I dropped dollops of the soft white dough into the simmering stew, I wept knowing how much Richard liked to help me do that part. If he was there, he’d lean over my shoulder and inhale the aroma, and say how good it smelled before taking a taste with my wooden spoon. 

Tonight, I wanted to fix my plate of food and abandon Theo to entertain Great Aunt Joan on his own and go upstairs to watch Grey’s Anatomy. Besides, those two had their own, after Richard left, familial language. They talked about her memories of him as a little boy playing in her big spacious garden and ruining her petunias, saying as she patted his hand across the table, “But my Theo could do no wrong.” 

“You could get away with anything with me,” Great Aunt Joan would often say. 

I wanted to scream, ‘But Richard shares his father’s DNA. Why can’t you absolve him from the guilt and excruciating pain he is carrying around? Can’t you see that he has started to shrivel up inside after he did what he did knowing it was wrong?’

***

Things haven’t been the same between Theo and I since Richard left. It’s hard to be around him knowing he doesn’t want to talk to or see his son. 

Each night I lay next to Theo, my back turned to his, unable to sleep. I hope one day he’ll open his arms up to Richard again and welcome him home. If he does, then maybe we can learn how to be a couple again, husband and wife. Maybe our bodies can seek each other in the night or early morning when the sun seeps through our blinds, for at least the familiarity of love, if no longer passion. Some things in a marriage, once a thread has been pulled to cause a tear in its already fragile tapestry, cannot be fully mended.   

***

I stare at Great Aunt Joan from across the table when I finally sit down with the rest of the food, to join her and Theo. She avoids my eyes and dredges a tiny piece of meat loaf on her fork in a mound of potatoes. She twirls it around her plate as if it was doing a pirouette before taking a bite and setting her fork down. 

“Richard loves my garlic mashed potatoes,” I say, not caring if anyone responds or Great Aunt Joan clutches her chest. 

“He loves my meatloaf too,” I say, sticking the knife all the way in. “He could eat it every day if I made it,” I say with a smile, before adding, “And these biscuits would be demolished if he was here. Not even a flaky crumb left.” 

Great Aunt Joan cleared her throat as if something was lodged in it. “I guess I better be getting me home Theo,” she said, her mouth twisted into a frown like she’d just bit into a lemon.

***

It was Great Aunt Joan’s pearl earrings that had caused the gulf between them. 

Richard had gotten laid off from his warehouse job through no fault of his own; they laid off over one hundred workers due to budget cuts. He’d been going on interviews for a few weeks but had no callbacks. Great Aunt Joan said she needed some work done around her home; a detached colonial built in the late 1930s that had seen better days. She offered to pay Richard but Richard said no. He just wanted to stay busy while he waited for another job to come through. Richard went to her house a few days during the week to clean out her attic, do some painting, and other odds and ends. 

One morning when he went there, Great Aunt Joan asked him to pull down some boxes from the top shelf of her bedroom closet so she could look through them. After he took the boxes down, he noticed a pair of pearl earrings on her dresser.  

He  said he wasn’t thinking and thought he could pawn them to get some extra money to hold him over and then get them back to her before she even noticed they were missing. He said he didn’t want to ask us or her for any more money and he thought he was going to get the job he interviewed for, hear some good news that week, because a friend put in a good word for him. 

So, he stuffed them in his jeans pocket. 

Great Aunt Joan noticed her pearl earrings were missing right away. She has an eagle’s eye, rarely misplaces things, and is, as Theo liked to say, as sharp as a whip. Richard had been the only one who’d been in her house so she knew he had to have taken them. 

“Why?” Theo and I asked when we confronted him. “If you needed money, you could have come to us.” 

“I already thought I was a burden…I just didn’t want to ask you for any more money,” he said, sounding like a little boy. He was a man now though. So, I resisted the urge to come to his rescue…then.

“So, you steal; that makes sense!” Theo yelled. His veins in his forehead almost seemed as if they were ready to pop.

“I’m sorry, I’ll never forgive myself for what I did,” Richard said as he swiped at his tears. 

Theo cursed. No letters like his mother Beatrice. Full on curses.  

“You have to go,” he told Richard. “I’m not going to live with a thief under my roof,” he yelled walking away, leaving Richard and I standing there.

I wanted to start a mutiny with Theo then. You can’t put our son out, I wanted to say, but it felt like gravel was in my mouth. So, I didn’t.  

I thought I’d give Theo time to process his disappointment and anger at Richard. Great Aunt Joan, too. I thought once Richard got her earrings back, after he didn’t get that job but took a dishwashing job at a restaurant to earn the money to buy them back, after he bought her a bouquet of petunias, which were her favorite flowers and wrote her a long letter apologizing, they would forgive him. 

But they didn’t. Not even when he got a permanent Parks Department job. 

Whenever he called me, he told me how he liked everything he was doing. The edging, the seeding, the fertilizing, and cleaning and maintaining of a green space for everyone to enjoy. He told me how plants and trees stored carbon dioxide throughout their lives, and how it helped slow the gas’s buildup in the air that has been steadily warming our planet. I am proud of him. I suppose Theo and Great Aunt Joan are too. They are just too stubborn to say so. 

I’ve always heard from the time I was little, that time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. Dammit. I wish that was true. 

***

I could feel Theo watching me before he helped Great Aunt Joan put on her coat, a black coat I had gotten for her from Nordstrom’s for her 80^th birthday. Richard had gone with me to the mall to pick it out and his gift too. He bought her a purple Amethyst necklace since her birthday was in February and a mug that said, “80 Years Loved.”  

I waved at Great Aunt Joan and told her I’d see her next Sunday before turning away to wrap two biscuits and a slab of meatloaf in some Saran wrap, leaving the rest of the food for Theo’s leftovers. 

“I’ll take this over to Richard tomorrow,” I said to no one in particular. And then I cleared the table and went upstairs to watch Grey’s Anatomy, satisfied Richard was going to get a taste of our Sunday supper even if it’s not in the house he grew up in, the house I pray one day he walks back into, and sits to the right of me at the dining room table. 

As I turn the volume of the television up, I close my eyes and envision him right there and hear his voice saying, “Ma, I missed this. I missed you all,” before the sound of all four of our forks clank on our plates.