Page 20 of Second Alarm
"Don't bring anything. Mom hates it when you bring anything."
"I'm bringing a bottle of wine."
"She hates that. It's pretentious."
"She loves it. I've been bringing it for years."
"She hates it."
"Cal."
"Fine. Bring the wine."
At 5:58 p.m. on Sunday, I pull into the Larsen driveway behind Cal's truck, with a bottle of the exact Oregon pinot noir I've been bringing to Mom Larsen's house since 2019, and I sit in my truck for forty-three seconds, and then I get out.
The house is the same house it has always been. Blue shutters, white siding, the porch swing that Mom Larsen hung herself the summer after her husband died because she said if she was going to sit out there crying she might as well have someplace to do it. The porch light is on. The wreath on the door is the summer wreath — the one with the little yellow birds. She hangs it in late May.
Cal is already inside. I can hear him through the screen. Cal is always already inside. Cal arrives at his mother's house like he's trying to catch her with her guard down, which is a lost cause, because Mom Larsen was born on high alert and has remained there for sixty-four years.
I knock.
"It's open, honey," Mom Larsen calls from the kitchen.
"Coming in."
I push through the door. The house smells like pot roast, and something with rosemary, and the specific cinnamon apple candle Mom Larsen has been burning in the entryway since I was twenty-three years old, and for a full second I'm standing in the same doorway I've been standing in for a decade, and the familiarity of it is a physical thing, and it's also, as of tonight, a lie, because there's a woman at the kitchen island slicing tomatoes, and the woman isn't the woman I usually see in this house, and the woman, tonight, is Hanna.
Hanna looks up.
Hanna goes still.
Mom Larsen, who's been chopping onions and hasn't yet looked up, says, "Tyler, bring me that bowl on the counter, would you."
"Yes, ma'am."
I set the wine on the sideboard, cross to the counter, pick up the bowl, and carry it to Mom Larsen, who finally looks up, and she smiles the smile she's always smiled at me — the smile of a woman who knows she's my Sunday mother — and she pats my cheek and says, "You got thin."
"I didn't get thin."
"You got thin," Hanna says, without looking up from the tomatoes.
"I weigh exactly what I weighed last month."
"You're working too hard," Mom Larsen says.
"I'm working exactly the same amount."
"You need more pot roast."
"Yes, ma'am." Dry as chalk.
Mom Larsen pats my cheek again and releases me. I turn. Hanna is watching the exchange with the expression of a womanwitnessing a diorama from her own life from the outside. She has a tomato halfway sliced. She hasn't sliced since I walked into the room.
"Hi, Hanna."
"Hi."
"Pot roast?"
