by Cara Malone
“That’s still an impossibility in my book,” Lorna said with a thin smile. “Well, are you girls sure I can’t make you something to eat? You’ve been on the road a long time.”
“Sure, mama,” Ruby said. “I’d love a sandwich. Max?”
“Umm, yeah,” Max said, studying Lorna’s expression. A subtle relief washed over her as Ruby gave her a goal that allowed her to escape this moment.
“Anything in particular?”
“Any kind will be good,” Ruby said. “You’ve never made a bad sandwich in my book.”
“Alright,” Lorna said. “Well, I’ll let you both put down your bags and relax a bit, and then you can come into the kitchen whenever you’re ready to eat. Ruby, you should give Max the tour if you can remember the layout after your long absence.”
She gave Ruby an affectionate pinch on the cheek, then headed for the kitchen at the end of the hall.
“Did I fuck up?” Max whispered, hoping that the marble floors wouldn’t carry her question to Lorna’s ears.
“That joke wasn’t in good taste,” Ruby said honestly, “but don’t worry about it. It’ll be one of those things we all look back on and laugh about later.”
Max didn’t want to laugh about it later. She wanted to make a good impression the first time around, but that was rarely in the cards. Ruby headed for the wide staircase and Max followed behind her, muttering, “I didn’t mean anything by it. The house is just massive is all.”
“It’s fine,” Ruby said as she ascended to the second floor and Max trailed her. “I guess I should have told you, but it’s such an awkward thing to tell someone. Oh, by the way, my family has money.”
Max snorted. That was putting it lightly.
“Seriously, though, don’t give it another thought,” Ruby said. “We’ll have dinner with my dad tonight, and tomorrow you’ll get to meet my little sister. Just steer clear of Bible quotes and you’ll get along with everyone just fine.”
They went upstairs and Max felt a little more comfortable knowing she was beyond the earshot of Lorna. Ruby turned around on the landing and gave her a quick peck on the lips, and when she tried to walk away Max managed to shift the bags on her shoulder and snag Ruby’s wrist, pulling her close for a deeper, longer kiss.
Ruby didn’t let her stay that way for long. She pulled away again, glancing toward the stairs – she wasn’t kidding in the car when she said that she was paranoid about her parents catching her in the act. She was blushing slightly as she said, “Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”
“My room?” Max asked with a sinking feeling in her chest.
Of course they would be sleeping separately – if Ruby’s parents thought so harshly about a little kiss, then there was no way she’d get away with sleeping in Ruby’s bed with her. It just hadn’t dawned on her until Ruby was leading her down the hall to a guest bedroom. Sleeping down the hall from Ruby, unable to touch her or even just snuggle innocently against her in the middle of the night, was almost as bad as not being with her at all. Max had only been in Chicago a few minutes and already she wasn’t enjoying her stay very much.
The hallway was wide, with hardwood floors and an oblong Oriental rug. Max followed Ruby past three closed doors, then a large white bathroom, and they stopped in front of a door at the opposite end of the hall.
“Do you ever lose your family members in this house?” Max asked, mostly because she was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with the level of opulence that Ruby knew as her birthright, and Max’s natural defense was to ask as many objective questions as possible. “Have you ever had to send out a search party?”
“Stop it,” Ruby whined. “You’re making me embarrassed. It’s not like I chose this house.”
“How many bedrooms does this house have?” Max asked, “Do your parents ever rent them out like a bed and breakfast?”
“I guess we do this week,” Ruby said with a laugh. “My sister brought home a friend from college, so we’ve got two guest rooms booked.”
Then she opened the door and stepped aside for Max to enter. It was large for a guest bedroom, with light pink walls and immaculately ironed sheets decorated with delicate flowers. The furniture all looked antique and every detail about the room – down to the extra linens and towels stacked neatly on top of the dresser – seemed too perfect to disrupt.
“How do you like your digs?” Ruby asked as Max set both bags down on the floor in front of the bed, too anxious to set them on the meticulously fitted sheets.
She was sure that she’d spend the entire week afraid to move in this room lest she wrinkle a sheet or damage one of the knickknacks on the bedside tables. Still feeling a little salty that she was being denied her accustomed place in Ruby’s bed, Max said, “It’s a guest room, alright.”
Ruby asked, “Were you expecting a straw bed in the barn?”
“You have a barn, too?” Max asked. “Do you have horses, too?”
“No,” Ruby said with another laugh. “This isn’t Martha Stewart’s house. Can you please cut out the rich people jokes?”
“Sorry,” Max said. “I just think you’re going to be awfully disappointed when you come to my parents’ house in July.”
“I’ve been to your parents’ house,” Ruby reminded her.
She had come to dinner with Max’s parents a few times during the past year, and Max realized now that Ruby must have been just as shell-shocked by the diminutive size of their house as Max was with this mini-mansion. Of course, Ruby had far too much tact to mention it, something that Max was often lacking in.
Still, Ruby had really only seen the dining room in Max’s parents’ house. That small sample would have done nothing to prepare her for an entire week of thirteen-hundred square foot living – not when she was used to this sprawling lifestyle. Of course, Ruby couldn’t help it if her parents were affluent – Max was just having a little bit of trouble adjusting to her new surroundings.
She could think of one thing that would help, though. She took a few steps closer to Ruby, closing the gap between their bodies and angling Ruby over to the bed, her hands going up to meet her hips just as Ruby’s heels struck the bed frame.
Max leaned in to kiss her, tasting the salt of the road on her skin, but just before they lost balance and toppled onto the crisp sheets, Ruby ducked and twisted under Max’s arm, retreating to the center of the room.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked. It seemed like ever since they got here, Ruby wanted to be as far away from her as possible.
“The door’s open,” she said.
“We can fix that,” Max answered, taking a few steps toward the door, but Ruby grabbed her bag off the floor and retreated away from the bed.
“We should get unpacked,” she said. “I want to hang up my clothes before they get wrinkled, and my mother is probably waiting downstairs with our sandwiches. Meet you in the hall in about ten minutes?”
“Oh,” Max said, dejected. “Okay.”
“We’ll eat and then I’ll give you the rest of the tour,” Ruby said, leaning in to place another quick peck on Max’s cheek. Then she disappeared into the hallway and Max just stood in the middle of the room.
She didn’t really want to unpack her bag because she couldn’t think of a good place to hide the ring box where Lorna’s cleaning service wouldn’t stumble on it, or Lorna herself if she was of a nosy persuasion, and she didn’t want to sit on the crisply ironed bed.
What she wanted most was to walk down the hall, figure out which bedroom was Ruby’s, step inside and lock the door. She wanted to pull her down onto the bed and make love with her because sex was the only way Max knew how to keep Ruby happy with any certainty. It was what brought them together in the first place, and it was something Max always felt confident with, no matter where her head was in other areas.
She was lucky – sex didn’t come easy for everyone, and a lot of people on the autism spectrum found it just as enigmatic as other social contracts that had rules but no inhere
nt logic or natural instincts attached. For Max, though, sex was a release – it was something that she could turn her mind off for and trust her body to handle, following the simple rule of doing whatever would bring the most pleasure to Ruby and to herself.
Without that aspect of their relationship available to her, though, Max had no idea how she was going to make it through the week, let alone the summer.
***
Lorna’s sandwich-making abilities turned out to surpass Ruby’s earlier praise. They went downstairs after a little while and Max ate the best Monte Cristo of her life, then Ruby gave her the grand tour. There was, indeed, a small barn that the family used to house their vehicles, as well as a large pool with a diving board, an outdoor bar and entertaining area, and several living rooms stationed throughout the house.
Max was feeling quite overwhelmed by the time Ruby’s father came home in the late afternoon, sun-beaten after a round of golf. Max’s heart immediately leapt into her throat when Ruby made the introduction, and she did her best to just be polite and formal to avoid a repeat of her first impression with Ruby’s mother.
“Maxine, so nice to finally meet you,” Ruby’s dad said, extending his hand. “I’m Lamar.”
Max took his hand, making intentional eye contact with him as she shook it firmly. “Nice to meet you, too.”
That would be safe enough.
“Daddy, she prefers Max,” Ruby said.
“He can call me Maxine if he wants,” Max said, and she couldn’t believe she was saying that. She hated her full name – it never felt like it belonged to her – but if it would ingratiate her to the people she hoped would be her in-laws in short order, then they could spend the whole week calling her Maxine Elizabeth for all she cared.
“Max it is,” Lamar said, releasing her hand. “Well, I better go upstairs and get changed for dinner.”
That was the extent of the interaction, and Max breathed a sigh of relief as he headed for the stairs. Lamar seemed a bit easier to get along with, or at least she’d done a better job of not immediately inserting her foot into her mouth like she’d done with Lorna. In any case, that was the type of interactions she needed to be having with both of Ruby’s parents if she hoped to get their permission to marry their daughter by the end of the week.
Ruby and Max went outside to the pool for a little while, relaxing in a pair of twin lounge chairs beside the water while the early summer sun baked down on them, and then Lorna came outside to call them in to dinner a little while later.
“We’re just going to eat in the kitchen if that’s okay,” she said. “Since Jade and her friend aren’t here, it will be easier than eating around the big table in the dining room.”
“Okay, mama,” Ruby said, taking Max’s hand to pull her up from the lounger.
If eating in the kitchen had been meant to be more casual than the large dining room Max had seen on her tour of the house, it didn’t quite achieve this goal. The table at one end of the kitchen was still large enough to easily seat eight people, and Lorna had nearly every inch of it covered with different dishes.
Lamar was already sitting at the head of the table, taking a pitcher of iced tea from the center of the table and pouring himself a glass. Lorna was at the stove, transferring large pieces of chicken parmesan from a cast iron skillet onto a serving dish.
“Don’t just stand there, girls,” he said as Max paused in the doorway and Ruby went over to claim a chair beside her father. “Come and get some grub. You an iced tea drinker?”
“Yes,” Max said, sitting down beside Ruby as he reached for her glass and poured from the pitcher. Ruby slipped her hand beneath the table and briefly squeezed her thigh, blushing as she did so and then passing the glass back to Max.
Lorna joined them, setting down the chicken in the center of the table and then taking a seat across from Max and Ruby. Max reached for her iced tea while everyone else bowed their heads, and Ruby quickly elbowed her to do the same.
There were so many things to remember whenever she was meeting new people and acclimating to new surroundings, and the concept of grace before meals had slipped her mind.
“Shit,” Max murmured, and just before she put her head down to match everyone else, she saw Lorna glancing up with a stern look. She probably shouldn’t have cursed, either, and she felt her cheeks growing hot.
She didn’t hear the majority of Lamar’s prayer – beginning with dear heavenly father and ending with a chorus of amen – because she was too focused on the increase in her heartrate and wondering what social faux pas she would commit next. It seemed like at every turn, she was messing something up, and she felt positively paralyzed, thinking it would be best to do nothing than to continue screwing up like this.
Then everyone raised their heads and started reaching for plates, passing them around the table, and Lorna asked Ruby, “How’s school going, butterfly?”
Max was grateful to let Ruby’s parents put the focus of the conversation on their daughter, happy to pass plates and just listen to her responses. Ruby talked about her classes, the majority of which Max had also taken, and GLiSS, which Max had ducked out of after she ceded the presidency to Ruby in the fall.
“It’s going to be over before I know it,” Ruby was saying. “The elected terms go from spring semester to spring semester, so when we get back to Granville in the fall I’ll have to start the process to elect new people. I’ll pass the baton to the new president just before winter break.”
“What about you, Max?” Lamar asked as he speared a large piece of chicken and slid it onto his plate. “Are you involved in any extracurriculars?”
“I’m part of the user experience design student organization,” Max said, “but I don’t hold any elected positions because I joined too late.”
“Oh yes,” Lorna said with a smile. “You and Ruby would have been duking it out for the GLiSS presidency back then, right? Did you know she once called you her sworn enemy?”
“Mama,” Ruby chastised.
“Well, obviously it didn’t last,” Lorna said, brushing off Ruby’s objection.
“You thought of me as an enemy?” Max asked.
“I said it in jest,” Ruby said, “and anyway, at the time we did kind of hate each other.”
Max had to admit that was true. She never could have hated Ruby, but they got off to a pretty rocky start and Ruby was not her biggest fan for quite a while in their first semester together. It made Max a little sad to remember that, and she also remembered how much courage it took to change Ruby’s opinion of her. She hoped that she wasn’t making a similar impression on Ruby’s parents – if she didn’t stop saying the wrong things and forgetting the Satterwhites’ customs, it would be awfully difficult to find the right time to tell Lamar about the ring in the bottom of her bag upstairs.
Ruby started talking about grad school again, telling her parents about her plans to work with the Granville Public Library children’s librarian in lieu of writing a traditional thesis at the end of next year for her culminating experience. She already had it all planned out, and had kept in contact with the librarian after they met during the same fall semester group project that had birthed the Greatest Hits in Cinema According to Ruby Satterwhite.
Max, on the other hand, was planning to write the thesis because it meant a lot of time spent researching and very little impetus to interact with people. That was her goal in her career, and in life, while Ruby couldn’t wait to be as hands-on as possible in her job.
Max was quiet for most of the meal. It was hard for her to speak off the cuff with people she didn’t know well, and she didn’t feel comfortable making contributions to the conversation that she hadn’t had a chance to run through her mind a time or two. That was how she’d ended up embarrassing herself in front of Ruby’s mother this afternoon, and she was determined not to commit any more gaffes.
She knew that first impressions weren’t her strong suit – even Mira said that Max needed time to grow on people. But she di
dn’t have time to grow on Ruby’s parents. She had six days.
CHAPTER 5
The next morning, Ruby suggested to Max that they go into the city. She wanted to introduce her to the places where she spent her time growing up, and she also thought it might be good for them to get out of the house. Max seemed to get more anxious and reserved every time she interacted with Ruby’s parents, and she thought that a day to themselves might give her a chance to relax and collect herself.
They left Ruby’s car behind in favor of the city’s public transport system, taking the L downtown where Max seemed equal parts enamored with and intimidated by the skyscrapers. When they got off the train near the cultural center, Max immediately craned her head back to look up at them.
“I always figured a tall building was a tall building,” she said. “There are some twenty-five story ones in Granville, but these make me feel like an ant. It’s almost dizzying.”
“Okay,” Ruby said with a laugh, looping her arm into Max’s. “Maybe don’t stare straight up at them, then.”
“It’s incredible. How many stories is that?” Max asked, pointing to the silver hulk of a particularly tall building rising up at the horizon point of the train tracks.
“I have no idea,” Ruby said. “A thousand?”
“That’s impossible,” Max said. “It’s probably over a hundred, though. This feels futuristic compared to Granville, like I’ve been living in a pre-industrial history book my whole life and didn’t even know it.”
“Come on,” Ruby said, pulling her away from the platform. “If this blows your mind, just wait until you see all the stuff I have in store for you today.”