“Pizza at my place.
A few kids.
Maybe basketball at the park if the weather’s good.”
“And Mason?”
“He’s fine.”
Two words.
After days of being told I was destroying him, Mason was fine.
Vanessa looked embarrassed when she said it.
“He was disappointed about the magician,” she added.
“But mostly he wanted his friends.”
I nodded.
Then she asked the question I knew was coming.
“Will you come?”
I thought about it before answering.
“Yes.
As his aunt.
Not as the sponsor.”
Her jaw tightened, but she nodded.
Mason’s birthday happened in Vanessa’s backyard with folding chairs, grocery-store pizza, a basketball hoop, and a cake far smaller than the three-tier creation she had originally ordered.
There were no gold invitations at the door.
No DJ.
No photographer directing children into poses.
No hotel employees waiting for payments.
Mason ran around with six friends until his face was red.
He laughed when one of them missed an easy shot.
He ate two slices of pizza and scraped extra frosting from the corner of the cake plate.
At one point, he came over to me carrying a basketball under one arm.
“Aunt Claire, want to play?”
That was all.
No accusation.
No speech about the ballroom I had supposedly stolen from him.
Just a ten-year-old asking his aunt to play basketball.
So I did.
Mom attended too, but she kept her distance at first.
Her phone had been moved to a cheaper individual plan.
She had changed the payment method on her insurance.
The mortgage was harder.
She had started looking seriously at her monthly spending and discussing options she had avoided while my transfer kept arriving automatically.
Late in the afternoon, she walked over while I was gathering paper plates.
“I was angry,” she said.
“I know.”
“I still think you could have handled it differently.”
“So could Vanessa.”
Mom looked toward the backyard where Mason and his friends were shouting over a basketball game.
Then she sighed.
“I didn’t realize how much you were covering.”
That sentence almost made me laugh, because she had known every individual payment.
What she had never done was add them together.
Neither had I.
“I didn’t realize how much I was covering either,” I said.
She looked at me carefully.
“Are you going to help with the mortgage again?”
There was no accusation in her voice this time.
Just a question.
“No.”
Her face tightened, but she accepted the answer.
