Chapter 12: OrangeHotCouponMama

From where she sat at her kitchen table, Eileen heard raised voices and then silence. She looked up, as if she could better see, but the refrigerator door, partially open, and the mass of a moss-green couch blocked her view out the front door. She put down her scissors with a sigh and stood to close the refrigerator door. The heavy Velcro tape that was supposed to keep it shut had been pulled away again, and Eileen made a note on the list of jobs for Shannon to do next weekend.

From upstairs, Eileen heard a shuffling and then silence. She exhaled with relief, pleased that Ann had not yet woken. When she came down, ready for a cup of tea and Archway oatmeal cookies, Eileen knew that Ann would want to see the newspaper. Eileen took a faded paper from a stack she kept in the pantry and slid it into a yellow plastic bag.

“Looks new enough,” she said softly to herself, returning to the table. In front of her were stacks of coupons, those that Dylan had cut out the night before, and those that she added to the pile. Counting them quickly, like a dealer shuffles cards, she arranged them in stacks of 20 and paper-clipped each pile.

Then she typed a password into a laptop computer and clicked the keys rapidly. She clicked on a bookmarked site, typed in “OrangeHotCouponMama,” her username, which she admitted was a poor choice, and then DYLAN, her password. Once on the site, she clicked busily, stuffing coupons into envelopes and copying addresses from the computer screen.

Only when she heard her mother laboring down the stairs, did Eileen turn off the computer and stash the coupons in a drawer next to the stove.

“Hey, Ma, how was your nap?” asked Eileen, rising to put the kettle on the stove. “I’ll get your tea right away.”

“You don’t do nothing for me,” replied her mother, not meeting her eyes. “You never did. Look at what happened today. You called the fire engines to come and take me away and they almost did. The lady fireman told me so.”

Eileen closed her eyes and sent a brief prayer for patience to St. Anne, Mary’s mother, chosen because she thought a woman might better understand.

“The fire engines were here for our new neighbor. Remember Naomi? The one in the purple pajamas?” Eileen spoke slowly with the exaggerated diction of a preschool teacher. Indeed, she imitated Shannon when she spoke to her mother, and envied Shannon’s patience with the very young – she taught three-year-olds – and with Ann.

Ann sat in Eileen’s chair at the table and looked confused. From the stove, where she hovered over the hot kettle, Eileen understood. She lifted her mother by one arm and coaxed her to her usual spot, where she could see out a window.

“I need my news,” said Ann abruptly. “No one here gives me the news paper.”

“Here it is,” answered Eileen, handing her mother the yellow bag. She watched her mother slide the newspaper from the bag and look wonderingly at it. While holding the kettle with one hand, Eileen reached for the bag with her other.

Ann read aloud from the front page. “Economic numbers strong. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie expecting twins. Missing tanker found off coast of Venezuela. Good weather expected to continue through the holiday weekend.” She turned to see Eileen dunking a tea bag into a mug and asked, “What holiday? It’s not Christmas now.”

“Probably a Canadian holiday, Ma,” said Eileen, serving her mother tea in a blue mug and cookies on a flowered napkin. “I put an ice cube in your tea to cool it. Let me take the paper while you eat.”

When Ann passed her daughter the newspaper, Eileen folded it and stashed in the pantry again. She sat across from her mother and smiled at her. Ann looked down at her snack, raising her head only to say, “Shannon’s home.”

An instant later, the doorbell rang. Eileen opened it to find Shannon, laden with yellow ShopRite bags and Dylan’s green backpack.

“Sorry,” said Shannon. “My keys are buried somewhere in my purse. How’s Ma today?”

“Pretty good,” answered Eileen. “She should be almost ready for bed when I leave for work.”

“No bad news then?” asked Shannon. “When she reads bad news in the paper, she won’t sleep.”
“No,” said Eileen, reaching for the grocery bags. “I keep giving her last summer’s paper, just before fourth of July when there’s no news anyway, and she doesn’t even notice.”

“Dylan’s across the street with Rohit,” said Shannon. “There’s some other kid there too and they need help measuring. Some tension about metric to English conversion. Perfect for Dylan.”

Eileen nodded. Her son, who was picked up and dropped off in front of their house by a small yellow school bus each day, was a child for whom words were difficult and numbers made sense. Abstract ideas of joy and freedom eluded him; he lived in a concrete world full of numbers that were his companions, his friends. It was difficult for Dylan to fill the silence between people unless numbers were involved. Whatever the metric problem, she hoped it would connect him to Rohit, whom she knew as a patient and precise boy.

Considering Rohit, Eileen smiled at herself in the mirrored wall of the living room. She knew that most mothers looked for other qualities in companions or babysitters for their sons. If Dylan were different, she might encourage him to play with an athletic kid or a sci-fi aficionado. But for Dylan, precision and accuracy were valued qualities.

Halfway between the front door and the kitchen, Eileen could see Dylan’s dark hair and yellow shirt from across the street. He was holding a yardstick – meter stick, she corrected herself – and crouching on the ground.

“Ei,” called her sister from the kitchen. “Ma says you didn’t make tea. Did you? And what about cookies?”

“She drank the tea and probably hid the cookies,” Eileen called back. “Check the cushion behind the chair. I found some there the other day.” She moved closer to the mirror to study her short hair. What about red, she asked herself, like the new neighbor’s hair, or Marilyn Monroe blonde? What would they say at the hospital if I walked in with a whole new look?
Eileen stepped away from the mirror and smiled at herself. “Not today,” she said. “Not because I can’t, just because I don’t want to.”

“Hey,” she said, walking towards the kitchen. “Let me tell you about the fire truck we saw today. And wait until Dylan hears about this one.” Eileen knew that she could tell the story at least twice more before work and her mother wouldn’t complain. Like the newspaper headlines, it would be new again, every time.