The Ghost Variations

Eidie’s birthday is the only time of year her mother and I see each other. More than just to say How are things? or When are you dropping Eidie off? Wendy moved to the city years ago, tired of the long commute, and I stayed out here in the same ranch house we bought as newlyweds. She gets Thanksgiving, I get Christmas. She gets Easter, I get Halloween. She gets a week in summer, I get the other 51. I have the better end, I know. And Wendy wants it this way. She knows, of course, I also have the harder end. So Eidie’s birthday is the only time Wendy and I are ever in the same room longer than a couple of minutes anymore, which is probably for the best.

This year Wendy appears at our front door a little early, bearing a khaki tote and a large cloth hanging bag. I am still in the kitchen, skimming headlines on the computer, and Eidie is in the living room watching TV and eating cereal in her nightgown. I let Wendy in and then excuse myself to change out of my pajamas. I trust her to host herself. She knows where we keep our things. They are her things, after all.

Wendy has come alone this year, and secretly I am happy. For a long time she insisted on bringing her husband to our annual celebration. In recent years, though, his attendance has grown intermittent. Everyone seems more at ease when he stays home. One year, at a miniature golf course, he had too many beers and called me a parasite. That was the same day Eidie got her first and only hole-in-one. Wendy and her husband have been married more than twice as long as she and I were married. By all indications, they are happy. He has two children from a previous marriage. He and Wendy have none.

When I come back out to the kitchen, Eidie has already unwrapped her mother’s present.

“Something wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we doing presents early?”

Usually we wait until after supper to give Eidie our respective gifts, but evidently not this year. The kitchen table brims with crumpled sheets of tissue paper in half a dozen bright, conflicting colors. Too much packaging for the tiny present Wendy has given Eidie—the same diamond engagement ring I bought Wendy my last year at the conservatory, with the liquidation of a decade’s worth of birthday stocks, to the deep displeasure of my parents. By then Wendy was a junior partner at her firm. Several years after that, she made equity. Now she is, at long last, retired. My own occupation, by contrast, is no different now than it was when I proposed. In this sense I have not aged a day.

Eidie is wearing Wendy’s engagement ring on her pinkie finger, the only finger it will fit on. Back when I bought the ring, I was too impatient to get it properly sized, and it spun freely on Wendy’s skinny ring finger. She never got around to having it adjusted. On Eidie’s little finger, though, the ring barely fits past the first knuckle. If Wendy spent more time around Eidie, she would know how our daughter hates to have such differences pointed out.

And yet somehow Eidie is smiling, her poor ruined mouth wide open as swift fat unbashful tears spill down her cheeks onto the tissue paper, the festive colors darkening in slow-spreading blotches.

“Let me see, baby.”

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

I take her fingers in my right hand and stroke her forearm with my left.

“It is.”

“I am so elegant.”

“Baby, what do you say to your mom?”

“Thank you!”

Eidie flings herself into Wendy’s lap, seizing her around the waist. Wendy grunts and her chair tips back, but she keeps smiling.

“Gentle, baby.”

“It’s okay.”

Wendy catches my eye. She has often complained that Eidie saves all her affection for her father. And it is true. Even when the three...