Work Text:
Jodi stirs the mashed potatoes, using a fork to smooth out the lumps. She adds a splash of milk and a thick square of butter. The rest of dinner is already cooked—meatloaf and green beans, oven-roasted—but the boys aren’t at the table yet, even though the placemats are lined up along with forks and knives. She and Sam have plain, woven placemats, but Vincent’s is plastic, a laminated map of the world. She notices he’s forgotten the napkins again, his only dinner chore, so she reaches into the drawer and sets them out herself.
She’s spent many, many nights of her life like this. Wiping crumbs off the stovetop, scouring cast iron skillets and keeping her arm on the mixing bowl to keep it from toppling over. Smoothing out edges and rounding corners.
Sometimes, it’s scary. Jodi feels like she could do it forever, and that’s what’s frightening, the endlessness. Caroline and Robin would always comment on how fast it all went by, how they’d woken up one morning to realize their children were now adults, their own people. She’d nod and agree, but couldn’t relate. Every day feels slow, treading water, trudging through mud. Maybe her memory’s just too good. Maybe her boys are too similar to one another, easy to confuse the younger with what the older one used to be.
She wouldn’t even call herself a homemaker. What’s a home without a head? A family without a father? Even still, she’s never regretted marrying Kent, not for a second, even if her memories of him are brief, like a flash. Jodi was fourteen when they met, seventeen when she found out she was pregnant, and eighteen when she married him, the same year he was stationed overseas for the first time. She gave birth to Sam without him, Evelyn and the old doctor before Harvey helping her through it. In Kent’s absence, she’s been strong enough to raise two boys hellbent on killing themselves, patching up busted lips and setting broken arms and clipping helmets underneath cement-kissed chins.
She hates the fact that she could go on living without him. Hates that she’s ready for the knock on the door, the cold, respectful government letter. She knows Sam feels the same. Vincent’s too young to care, even though he might feel the effects later, and sometimes Jodi thinks she’d rather have him remember his father as the handsome man framed on the mantel than the husk he’ll come home as. And the boys will never know what he was when he was hers and hers alone, those short two years when he was still wily and lean and young, with a lopsided smile from a missing tooth and a scar running down his left wrist where an eel had bitten him. He’d tried catching it so she could make one of her favorite meals, but they’d spent the night in the clinic, Kent drunk off the whiskey she’d brought him to kill the pain.
The potatoes are salty and smooth enough now to dollop onto the plates. Jodi serves Sam first, then Vincent, then herself. She gives herself the biggest portion of green beans, saving the energy of transferring her sons’ unfinished vegetables to her plate later. She pulls out a fourth plate and tries to gauge how much she would put on Kent’s plate if he were here, if he walked through the door right now, when she was expecting Sam instead. Another slice of meatloaf for him, surely, a third bigger portion of mashed potatoes, a few extra beans. She shaves off a thin slice of butter and watches it melt on top of the potatoes, the perfect taste for her imaginary husband. Then she stretches Saran wrap over the waiting plate and shelves it in the fridge next to a jar of the farmer’s mayonnaise and salmon still wrapped in brown paper.