“Anyone else due to show up?” Now Donny scanned the room. “Looking forward to seeing some of the old faces again.”
“Well, I don’t know, to be honest.” Cerise caught Barb’s eye. “But I have the feeling that if she did invite anyone, they’ll be fully male.”
Barb snorted. At least she was laughing.
There was a hand on Cerise’s elbow and she turned to see Kyle. “Oh, thank god,” she said, practically falling into his arms.
“Yeah.” He laughed and she could hear in his voice that he understood every bit of her pain. “Crowded room tonight.”
“You have no idea,” said Barb.
The clinking of a knife on crystal filled the air.
“If I may interrupt...” Violet stood at the doorway dividing the living room from the dining room, holding her glass aloft. “Dinner is now served.”
As the guests made their way to the table, Barb took Cerise gently by the arm and whispered in her ear, “Methinks the only strategy we have for surviving tonight is to float above the crazy.”
Cerise laughed, relieved more than anything else that Barb’s instinct was to turn toward their relationship rather than to retreat. She leaned in and kissed her. Then added, “Methinks you’re right. And when that fails, there’s wine.”
There were name cards at every place. Cerise was in a corner at her mother’s end of the table and sweaty Erik Clarkson was on her right. Until Barb walked up and switched her place card with his.
“This way we can pass the baby back and forth,” Barb said with a wink.
Violet spotted the change immediately and scowled, but said nothing.
Barb’s father was seated directly across from them. Eldris was on his left and next to her was Amanda. Then there was Kyle, Donny and Erik, who were all lined up in a row at her dad’s end of the table.
Lucky them.
It was cramped quarters, and as Cerise sat, she found that she had no choice but to straddle the leg of the table. Her parents’ dining room was really only meant to seat ten, but her mother had squeezed in two extra place settings. It was some relief that Rhonda still hadn’t arrived, but the guests were elbow to elbow, nevertheless.
Adam, in fact, had the best seat in the house. He was fast asleep in his infant carrier in the corner.
“I hope everyone is pleased with white wine for the salad course,” her mother announced. “We’ll switch to red with the lamb.”
Cerise hated lamb.
“I’m a complete novice when it comes to wine,” said Eldris, loudly enough for the table to hear. “I’m afraid you could serve me communion wine tonight and I wouldn’t know the difference.”
Cerise watched as Kyle’s dad rolled his eyes, then flinched. Best she could figure, Kyle must have given him a swift kick to the shin under the table.
“No worries,” barked Elliott. “Just drink whatever my wife drinks. She’s an expert.”
“Oh,” said Eldris, turning to Amanda. “How did you develop your expertise? Do you study, like a chef would?”
“Hardly,” said Elliott, answering for his wife. “You just drink until you can’t think straight anymore. Then you’re an expert on everything.” He laughed as if he’d just made the funniest joke of the entire evening and didn’t seem to care in the least about the silence encircling him.
“Dad,” growled Barb.
Elliott held his hands up in defeat.
“Edward?” said Violet, her voice almost shrill with intent. “Please do say grace.”
Everyone bowed their heads.
“Heavenly Father,” said her dad. “We thank you tonight for bringing us together in honor of this dear child, Adam.”
Ever since she was a little girl, Cerise’d had a thing about keeping her eyes closed during prayer. People just looked so funny when they were trying to commune with the Lord. Like Kyle’s mom right now, trying to mumble silently along with the words—as if this were a scripted prayer—but looking like a crazy person talking to herself on the bus.
“May you bless his life, just as you have blessed us.”
Plus, it felt like cheating, watching people. She sneaked a quick peek at her mother and caught her with her own lids half-open, scanning the table for secret nonconformists.
“Guide us, as we strive to live as you have taught us.”
Her mother had caught her cheating prayer a few times as a kid, and Cerise had just claimed to have something in her eye, blinking like a mad fool until the scolding stopped.
“Full of grace and peace.”
Cerise closed her eyes briefly, then couldn’t help but peek across the table again. Kyle’s mom had surrendered and gone still. But not Barb’s mom. Cerise saw Amanda use the moment to slip a tiny white pill into her wine.
“In Jesus’s name we pray.”
Good grief. Why couldn’t she just pop it into her mouth like a normal lush? Cerise looked quickly at Barb, but she’d actually bowed her head and closed her eyes and missed the whole thing.
“Amen,” her dad said.
“Amen,” the table replied.
Amanda lifted her glass and took a long swig.
“I never have been able to cook lamb very well,” said Eldris, restarting the conversation. “Always too dry, no matter what I do.”
“It’s the fat,” said Amanda. “The fattier, the better when it comes to lamb.”
Cerise noted the tiniest slur grabbing hold of Amanda’s Ss. She wondered if Barb heard it, too, but saw no reaction.
“Do you cook a lot, Mrs. Hesse?” Cerise asked, more curious about where her sobriety was headed than her culinary pursuits.
Amanda gave her a dreamy smile. “Only when my husband is gone,” she said.
Elliott snorted. “Yeah, I’m afraid it’s liquids-only dinner when I’m around.”
The silence that followed threatened to swallow the table whole.
Then Donny. Until that moment Cerise had forgotten what she’d always loved about him—his willingness to take on a room, no matter what the stakes. He’d done it as a teenager, forever derailing classroom bullies with a joke at his own expense. One time, she suddenly recalled, he’d even intervened on Mrs. Spurloch, the school nurse who came into classrooms every spring to warn students about STDs, using the same scared-straight stack of full-color slides she displayed via overhead projector year after year.
“Mrs. Spurloch,” he’d said. “I know everyone has seen your pictures before. But I’d be happy to stand in as a real-life model of what genital warts can look like if gone untreated for too long.” He stood and made for his zipper and the whole room fell apart. He was sent immediately to the principal’s office, but his sacrificial act had effectively taken the wind out of the nurse’s sails and spared their class a painful afternoon.
“So, Elliott,” Donny said. “I noticed the insignia on your ring. Is that Harvard? Yale? I was just barely lucky enough to make it through junior college, myself, so you’ll have to school me.”
“St. Sainsbury,” said Elliott. “The men in my family have attended for six generations now.” He cleared his throat. “Amanda and I, of course, had daughters. So they attended Lady Augustine’s.”
As he was speaking, Cerise thought she saw Eldris reach for her glass of wine, only she could have sworn that she grabbed Amanda’s by mistake.
Oh, crap. Everything was so tight at the table, who could tell what from what?
“Ah, the sweet days of Lady Augustine’s,” said Barb. “Or, as we called it, ‘Lady Blow-out-my-jeans.’” She hooted at her own joke. “Because there were basically two types of girls there—you were either too fat from the cafeteria food to wear anything except the skirt that came with the uniform or you popped so many laxatives trying to keep from getting fat that you couldn’t risk wearing anything else.” She looked around the room. “You know, ’cuz jeans, wel
l—” she stopped.
“Don’t be coarse, dear,” said Amanda.
Cerise thought Barb’s mom was definitely beginning to slur now. She looked at Amanda’s wineglass. It was nearly empty. Had it been so low before?
“I always thought boarding school would be so glamorous,” said Eldris. “Remember when we looked into private school for Kyle?” she said, looking down the table at Richard.
“Nope,” he said, refusing to meet her glance.
“Well, I do. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for him.”
She reached for her wine again and this time, Cerise was sure of it—she was definitely drinking Amanda’s tainted brew.
Eldris returned the empty glass to the table. “Oh, my heavens,” she said. “Did I drink a full glass already?”
Cerise watched Amanda’s face as she put the pieces of the ill-fated mix-up together in her addled head. She flushed a deep crimson, but said nothing.
“It’s a funny thing how laxatives actually work,” said Ed, circling back to Barb’s boarding school days. “The commercials would have you believing it’s all about the fiber, but it’s really a matter of water being drawn into the large bowel.”
Cerise saw her mother stiffen. “Edward,” she said, cautioning.
But it was too late. He was in his head and sauntering down whatever path he saw in front of him. “Although, stimulant laxatives work quite differently in that their job is to stimulate the intestinal muscles. Productive spasms, really, all the way down the bowel.”
“Really?” Barb was egging him on. Cerise went to nudge her under the table but only ended up smacking her knee against the hard, wooden leg.
Damn it.
“Oh, yes. They’re quite effective. But of course, overuse comes with a high risk of overstimulating—you could say deadening—the intestinal lining. Then a person is left with a total loss of bowel control, a state of constant constipation. Lazy Bowel Syndrome, it’s called.”
“Aha!” said Donny. “I knew there was an official name for it. That’s what my dad used to call me growing up. Except he used the term, Lazy Little Shit.”
Richard, then, who hadn’t said more than a single word all evening, howled as if he’d never heard anything so funny in his whole life.
“Richard!” Eldris scolded.
He harrumphed but didn’t apologize.
Donny, though, did. “Gosh, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Baumgartner. That was crude of me.”
Violet stood. “Who is ready for lamb?”
She gathered the guests’ salad plates and Ed stood to pour the red wine. “The man at Surdyk’s assures me that this is the perfect Pinot for chops.” He had to squeeze between the guests and the wall and Cerise saw him struggling to suck in his belly as he went. “I followed his instruction to open it one hour before drinking.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be perfect.”
He reached their end of the table and poured. Amanda’s white wine was, of course gone, and he refilled her glass with the red. Cerise glanced at Eldris’s glass. It was empty, too.
Now she was thoroughly confused. Had Eldris actually been drinking Amanda’s wine? Or worse, had she drained two glasses of white on nothing but a bellyful of lettuce?
Oh, god.
She tried to catch Kyle’s eye, but he was on the same side of the table as her, all the way down at the other end. She leaned over to Barb, instead.
“Your mom slipped a pill into her wine and I think Kyle’s mom drank it.”
Barb looked at her like she was crazy. “What?”
“I saw your mom slip a pill into her wine. And then I think Kyle’s mom drank it by mistake.”
Barb looked at the two women across the table. Eldris was busy trying to engage Amanda in a conversation about her dream of making a trip to New England for the fall colors.
“It mus’ jus’ be gorgeous.” Cerise could hear the same slur grabbing ahold of Eldris’s words that had first grabbed on to Amanda’s. Only, Eldris seemed to be fast-tracking.
“All the orn’jez an’ redz an’ yellz an’ golz. Perplz? Izz’ere perpl, too?”
Amanda replied, stone-faced, “I wouldn’t know. We live in Ohio.”
Barb was now apparently convinced of trouble. “Mom,” she hissed. “What did you do?”
Amanda turned to Barb and smiled. “Are you enjoying yourself, dear? Such a lovely family.”
From Cerise’s angle, it appeared like Amanda had a faraway glassy look to her eyes, but now she wasn’t entirely convinced it hadn’t been there all night.
“She’s clearly been into your wine,” said Barb, flicking her head in Eldris’s direction.
Eldris, in the meantime, was visibly sliding down the seat of her chair.
“Up you go!” Elliott now, with his carnival barker voice.
Cerise saw him reach over and pinch Eldris at the waist.
She squealed and bolted upright. “You’re naughty!”
The attention of the entire table was now squarely tuned to Amanda, Eldris and Elliott.
“Everything all right down there?” asked Ed, having returned to his seat.
“Oh, I thin’ I may’ve had too mush onnan empty tummy,” said Eldris.
“She’ll be fine once the lamb comes,” barked Elliott. “Always seems to perk Amanda right up, at least.”
Amanda turned to Richard. “I think your wife may have dipped into my wine. You’ll want to give her an aspirin before bed, I’m afraid.”
Richard leaned down the table to look at his wife, who was now sliding back down her chair toward the floor.
“Eldris!” Now he was barking.
“I got her,” Elliott barked back. And, once again, pinched her squarely at the waist.
“OH!” Eldris squealed, this time not just sitting up, but standing. Just at the moment Violet arrived with the platter of lamb—and just as the front door opened with a clatter.
“I’m finally HERE!” called Rhonda.
Cerise watched in horror as Eldris’s shoulder clipped the plate as she stood and twelve chops flew into the air, each one catching a beautiful glint of the light from the dinner candles in their mint glaze as they fell.
SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT! The cascade of meat splash-landed onto the table piece by piece, a few of them even hitting Violet’s prized Stickley with such angular precision that they bounced into the air again and swan-dived onto the freshly shampooed Berber carpet below.
No one moved. Not a single guest appeared to breathe or lift their eyes from their chests. No one, at least, until Cerise suddenly had no choice but to duck as a chop flew from her mother’s hand and headed directly for Rhonda’s face. The guests all shrieked as it hit, a chop-shaped bull’s-eye at the center of Rhonda’s gleaming white shirt.
Violet, her lips quivering with ghoulish green globs of mint jelly pointed a gnarled, angry finger at Rhonda and screamed in a pitch Cerise had neither heard nor elicited from her mother in all of her thirty years on this earth.
“You. Ruin. Ev-e-ryTHING!”
39
Richard
DAMN, IF ALL hell wasn’t breaking loose.
“This is a three-hundred-dollar shirt!” Rhonda screeched, dripping green grease in the Baumgartners’ entryway. “And SILK!”
No one had yet to move. But Violet, still holding half of the broken chop platter in her hand, stirred, raising her head at the sound of Rhonda’s voice. Then, hand-to-God, if she didn’t create one of the craziest goddamn spectacles Richard had seen in his whole life—Violet opened her mouth and began to roar, pure, resonant rage filling the air, a literal lioness defending her territory.
All right, so maybe hell wasn’t the word for it. The night had turned full-on primal.
Then Kyle, as if called by an animal duty, leaped to his fiancée’s defense. Like he could even do anything to help
her. Like any of this mess was his fault in the first place. Didn’t matter. The kid decided to rush to Rhonda’s side, only to send his chair, as he stood, careening into Violet’s glass-fronted china cabinet.
SMASH! Richard heard the unmistakable sound of another thousand bucks down the shitter.
He and everyone else at the table ducked, instincts kicking in enough to shield their eyes from the flying glass. When he looked up, he saw that whatever parts of the table weren’t splattered with lamb chop guts now glistened with shards of Violet Baumgartner’s china hutch.
Ed, standing and doing his diplomatic best to calm the mayhem, said, “Now, then. Not the end of the world. I’m sure we can have this cleaned up in just a few minutes.” But there was no salvaging the night. The baby was wailing, Rhonda was screeching, Violet thundered into the kitchen and Eldris—goddamn drunk or high or both—had somehow managed to slide into Elliott Hesse’s lap.
“This one’s yours, Dick,” he barked, snapping his fingers in Richard’s face. “Too sticky for my taste, I’m afraid.”
If he’d had a better angle on the son of a bitch, he would have punched him right in the face. Instead, he stood, picked Eldris up by the waist, threw her over his shoulder and walked directly out the front door.
He could hear the din of the ongoing mayhem spill from the open doorway, all the way down to the corner where he’d parked.
* * *
NOW RICHARD SAT in his favorite chair, a tumbler of Scotch in his hand, waiting out Eldris’s hysterics. She’d holed up in the bedroom as soon as they got home and refused to come out. He’d tried knocking but she started in with the name-calling and that never led anywhere good. So he’d retreated, and here he sat.
The front door opened and Kyle’s voice echoed from the hall. “Hello?”
“In here,” he called back.
Kyle peeked his head around the corner of the living room. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
He made his way to the couch and collapsed as if his legs could no longer hold him. He sighed and rubbed the heel of his palm across his eyes. Poor kid looked like hell.
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners Page 25