Yoharie (part fifteen)

Yoharie

Dawn

(part fifteen)

Dawn tapped, passed the door at her stepdaughter’s sigh, leading with a hangar and plaid skirt.

Giarma was looking at fashion (2 items Dawn could spot in her cart). She walked her chair back, extracted a strand of hair from her lip gloss…kept a hand on the mouse. “Oh, I can’t wear that.”

They were prickly together, trying to become friends.

But trying.

Yoharie had no handle on Giarma as a grownup, and they hadn’t expected her to come live a month after they’d got this house. In the apartment days, she didn’t visit. Or barely, under holiday pressure, pretending hard to see nothing about her father. Asking him nothing about his legs.

She stopped for the length of a meal, chose Thanksgiving over Christmas. “I hate driving when it’s cold. And I should be with Mom… Oh, and you don’t have to cook, Dawn. Please don’t cook.”

Please don’t send us a gift. But Dawn had cooked, and Giarma had sent them a large, guilty set of cutting board, metal skewers, steak knives.

Dawn’s mother, too, had to be part of family things. You couldn’t keep Tina away on pretexts. She would suspect, she already did, that Yoharie’s kids disliked her. Tina with a bone to pick cooked from her magazines, cheesy and potatoey casseroles that couldn’t be served on the couch with sandwiches.

And Yoharie needed food.

His holidays could not have been joyful; his family…his single mother, had Lord knows not been joyful. But every good Boomer with a bad childhood still cherishes the turkeys and hams, the gingerbread men, the tinsel trees, Styrofoam snowflakes. Fat lights.

Yes, the tree was up, and staying put. Giarma forked at Jello salad, and sighed.

Tina asked Val point-blank if he was gay.

He stuffed a turkey leg in his mouth and gave her a goofy face.

“It’s okay,” Tina said.

“She says its okay,” Giarma told her brother, low.

“Do you have hobbies?” Tina asked her. “Your name is what? Sorry.”

“No.”

“I guess I’m just starting a little conversation. You know when I bought this? Thirty years ago. You know what size it is? Ten.”

“Really? That’s kind of depressing. I wear a six…” Giarma took the skirt. “This looks snug.”

“That’s the thing. And back then, you were fat. You had to be an eight.”

“Hmm…okay, now I have to try it on. I don’t really like it.” Warningly.

“No, I get you. It’s prim.” It had taken Dawn a second to come up with the word, and Giarma had already slipped into the bathroom.

15

Yoharie

Yoharie (part sixteen)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)