Want Things Loudly

Chapter 1: The Allergy Rememberer

Martha Keane knew the following things about her family, committed to memory the way other people memorized prayers or PIN numbers:

Cousin Deborah could not sit within three chairs of Aunt Paulette unless someone wanted to hear, in forensic detail, about the 1997 Thanksgiving yam incident. Uncle Gio was allergic to shellfish but would eat it anyway if no one was watching, so someone always had to be watching. Her nephew Tyler had gone vegan in February, flexitarian in March, and was now in a phase he called "ancestral eating," which appeared to involve a lot of jerky and unsolicited opinions. Her niece Becca could not be asked about her boyfriend, her job, or her bangs without consequences.

Martha knew all of this because Martha was the family fixer.

She was the middle daughter, the emergency contact on seven different forms, the reunion organizer, the allergy rememberer, the person who maintained a color-coded spreadsheet of dietary restrictions that she updated quarterly like a tax return. She was the woman who knew which cousin could not sit beside which aunt unless everyone wanted a cheese board weaponized before dessert.

She had not cried since 2011.

Not because she was made of stone. Because there was simply no time in the schedule.

Crying required a minimum of twenty minutes—the cry itself, the nose-blowing, the cold water on the face, the staring at yourself in the mirror wondering when you started looking like a woman who needed to cry more. Martha did not have twenty minutes. Martha had a catering business to run, a mother's seventy-first birthday dinner to organize, a husband who had been sleeping in the den for four months, and a van that made a noise she had named Trevor because it felt less frightening if the engine problem had a name.

"Trevor's acting up again," she told the mechanic.

"Ma'am, I really wish you'd stop naming—"

"Is Trevor going to make it through the weekend?"

The mechanic sighed. "Trevor needs a new alternator."

"Trevor needs to hold it together until after this birthday dinner, and then we can talk about his needs."

This was Martha's approach to most problems: triage, postpone, survive.

Her own life was quietly on fire, but Martha did not do her own problems. She did everyone else's. It was easier that way. Other people's problems had edges. You could see where they started and where they ended. You could make a list. You could check things off.

Her own problems were more like weather.

Take Bill.

Bill Keane, her husband of nineteen years, had migrated to the den in January under the diplomatic banner of "his back." His back, which had apparently staged a coup against the marital bed, required the specific therapeutic support of a twenty-year-old couch, two fleece blankets, and a television tuned to the History Channel at volumes that suggested the Allied forces were landing nightly in their living room.

Martha had not challenged this.

She had bought him a lumbar pillow.

She had left ibuprofen on the coffee table like offerings at a shrine.

She had explained it to her sister Anita as "a phase," to her brother Kevin as "a back thing," and to herself as something she would deal with after the birthday dinner, after the Hoffman wedding, after the Rotary luncheon, after the thing after the thing after the thing.

The catering business—Keane's Kitchen, a name Bill had suggested in 2014 with the enthusiasm of a man who thought puns were a viable business strategy—was one bad wedding away from insolvency. The Hoffman wedding had nearly been that bad wedding. The bride had changed the menu four times, the groom's mother had a sensitivity to "anything Mediterranean," which apparently included olives, tomatoes, and joy, and the venue's kitchen had a gas leak that was discovered forty minutes before service when Martha's sous-chef, a twenty-three-year-old named Diego who was too talented to be working for her and too loyal to leave, said, "Either I'm having a stroke or I smell death."

They had cooked the entire reception on portable burners in the parking lot.

Martha had smiled the entire time.

Smiling was her second-best skill, after remembering allergies.

Now it was Saturday, and she was in her mother's kitchen—her parents' kitchen, the kitchen of Frank and Joyce Dugan's split-level in Barton Heights—arranging seventy-one candles on a sheet cake because Joyce had insisted on accuracy.

"Every year counts," Joyce had said on the phone. "I'm not rounding down. I'm not forty and holding. I'm seventy-one, and I want every candle."

"Mom, seventy-one candles is a fire hazard."

"Then we'll go out in a blaze of glory."

Martha had bought the candles.

She always bought the candles.

The house smelled like garlic and old arguments. Frank Dugan was in his recliner, watching golf with the sound off, which was his preferred way to experience all of life's events. Kevin was in the dining room, adjusting place cards with the precision of a man defusing a bomb. His wife, Sheila, was helping in the way Sheila always helped: by standing nearby and narrating everything that was going wrong.

"The salad forks are on the wrong side," Sheila said.

"There are no salad forks," Kevin said. "It's a family dinner."

"Then why are there place cards?"

"Because there are place cards."

This was Kevin and Sheila's marriage in miniature: a series of circular conversations that never landed anywhere but never quite crashed.

Anita arrived late, which was her custom, carrying a bottle of wine and an expression that suggested she had already diagnosed everyone in the room from the driveway.

Anita Dugan-Nakamura was the youngest of the three siblings, a licensed therapist who could not stop diagnosing her own family. She had a practice in Cedarville, a patient husband named Tom who worked in IT and had the calming energy of a screen saver, and a twelve-year-old daughter, Miko, who was already showing signs of the Dugan tendency to observe everything and address nothing.

"How's Dad?" Anita asked Martha in the kitchen, keeping her voice low.

"Alive. Vertical. Watching golf."

"Has he said anything?"

"He said 'hello' when I arrived and 'that's fine' when I asked where to put the lasagne. So we've had our annual conversation."

"Martha."

"Anita."

"I'm just saying, the emotional withholding in this family—"

"Is very efficient and has gotten us through seventy-one birthdays without incident. Can you open the wine?"

Anita opened the wine. She also opened her mouth to say something therapeutic, but Martha handed her a corkscrew and a look, and the look won.

The family gathered.

There were fourteen of them around the table, which technically seated twelve but could accommodate fourteen if everyone agreed to eat with their elbows tucked and their grievances compressed. Uncle Gio was already eyeing the shrimp cocktail. Cousin Deborah was seated safely at the far end from Aunt Paulette, separated by two neutral cousins and a bread basket that served as a demilitarized zone.

Frank said grace.

Frank's grace was always the same: "Thank you for this food. Amen." He delivered it with the brisk efficiency of a man reading a receipt, and then the salad was served, and then the lasagne was served, and then Joyce Dugan stood up.

She stood up between the salad and the lasagne.

This was unusual.

Joyce was not a standing-up-at-dinner woman. Joyce was a retired school secretary, a matriarch, a woman who had once refused anaesthesia during a root canal "to stay alert." She ran the household the way she had run the front office of Barton Heights Elementary for thirty-one years: with clipboards, firm eye contact, and an absolute refusal to repeat herself.

She was wearing a new blouse. Martha noticed this. It was coral. Joyce had never worn coral.

"I have an announcement," Joyce said.

The table adjusted. Forks paused. Uncle Gio put down a shrimp.

"I am leaving your father."

The forks did not resume.

"I am going to marry Sonny Calise."

Silence.

"Sonny is seventy-six. He is a magician on cruise ships. I met him on the Panama Canal cruise in March. The wedding will be in eight weeks, on the ship, before it repositions to the Mediterranean. Possibly forever."

She sat down.

She picked up her fork.

She ate a piece of lasagne with the calm precision of a woman who had just detonated a grenade and was now enjoying the acoustics.

Fourteen people stared.

Frank finished his lasagne.

He finished the entire plate in complete silence—methodical, thorough, the way he mowed the lawn, the way he filed taxes, the way he had apparently conducted his marriage for forty-nine years.

Then he looked up and said, "Does anyone want my garlic bread?"

It was a display of emotional repression so profound, so architecturally complete, that Anita whispered, "Genuinely fascinating," and then burst into tears.

Kevin's face went through a sequence of expressions that Martha would later describe as "the five stages of Kevin": confusion, suspicion, outrage, calculation, and finally the grim resolve of a man who was about to create a spreadsheet.

"Who is Sonny Calise?" Kevin said.

"I just told you," Joyce said.

"You told us he's a magician. That's not a profession, Mom. That's a hobby with scarves."

"He's performed on six cruise lines."

"That's not a rebuttal."

"Kevin," Martha said.

"Martha."

"Not here."

"When, then? When she's on a boat?"

"It's a ship," Joyce said. "Boats are what your father takes to catch fish he throws back, which I have always found to be a metaphor he refuses to examine."

Frank reached for the bread basket.

Uncle Gio, who had been frozen with a shrimp halfway to his mouth for the duration of the announcement, finally ate it. This seemed to break the spell. Aunt Paulette asked if anyone wanted more wine. Cousin Deborah said she had always known something like this would happen, which was a lie, but Deborah had a gift for retroactive intuition. Sheila looked at Kevin. Kevin looked at Martha.

Martha looked at her mother.

Joyce met her eyes with an expression Martha had never seen before.

It was not defiance, exactly.

It was not apology.

It was the face of a woman who had made a decision and was no longer interested in the committee's feedback.

Martha's assignment was never spoken aloud.

It did not need to be.

Fix it.

Un-ring the bell.

Get Mom back in her lane before the golden anniversary party, already scheduled for week nine, with a venue deposit that was both nonrefundable and, according to Martha, "legally mocking us."

Martha excused herself to the bathroom, locked the door, and stared at herself in the mirror for four minutes.

She did not cry.

There was no time in the schedule.

She flushed the toilet for appearances, washed her hands, and went back to the table to serve the cake with seventy-one candles, every single one of which Joyce blew out in a single breath, as if she had been practicing for months.

Which, Martha realized later, she probably had.