Either you go and clean my mother's apartment right now, my husband said, or tomorrow I file for divorce — six months out of work, living on my salary, saying it with a beer in his hand. I didn't argue. I took the keys and walked out. What was behind his mother's door turned that threat around on him inside forty minutes.

"Mom's blood pressure's up," Wade announced. "She's staying a few days. She'll have our room."

"She has a house twenty minutes away."

Ilma sighed at the ceiling. "If I'm in the way I'll just go home and die on my own."

"Bernie, make her a tea," Wade said. "And do the hall, she dropped her drops."

"You do it."

He came closer. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not your housekeeper and I'm not your mother's."

Her birthday was that Saturday.

She had it in my apartment. Twenty people, in my front room, and I catered it, and I want to be clear that nobody asked me to and that this is the part I have to own.

At about eight in the evening I was crossing the room with a platter in both hands.

Wade came over, took the platter out of my hands and passed it sideways to his cousin without looking at him.