My sister called on a Thursday afternoon in October, while I was sitting at my desk editing a portrait session. Her name on the screen was enough to shift my mood slightly, the way certain names do when you have learned to brace before answering. I picked up anyway, because I always picked up.
“Wendy, the anniversary party is this weekend,” Cheryl said. Her voice had the practiced projection of someone who has spent years on stage, every sentence shaped for clarity and effect. “It’s just for family.
Mom is swamped with planning. She couldn’t call herself.”
I did not say anything for a moment. My cursor hovered over a photograph on my screen, a woman in a yellow dress laughing at something just out of frame.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you mean just for family?”
“I mean it’s a small thing, immediate family only. We didn’t want to overwhelm Mom.”
I set down my coffee.
“Cheryl. I am family.”
“Of course you are,” she said, in the tone people use when they are not conceding the point at all. “It’s just the way it worked out.
You know how these things go. You’re always so busy anyway.”
I let that sit for a second. Then I said okay, and I hung up.
I sat at my desk for a long time after that. The woman in the yellow dress was still laughing on my screen. Outside, the October light was going sideways and gold across the parking lot.
I thought about the $2,000 I had sent my mother three weeks earlier because she had texted asking for help with party expenses. I thought about the $500 I had sent the week after that for extra catering. I thought about the conversation when Cheryl had called asking whether I could cover airfare for my aunt from California, and I had said I could not, and she had replied: wow, way to let us down, Wendy.
I thought about the fact that this party had been, in some significant part, funded by me. And I had not been invited to it. Let me explain who I am and where I come from, because the phone call only makes sense in the context of everything that preceded it.
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