by Cara Malone
“Since when are you and Megan friends?” she asked.
She didn’t know how she felt about her ex-girlfriend hanging out with her little sister, especially if it was going to come up in front of Max. Megan was a source of tension in the early days of their relationship and on top of her struggles to make sure Max felt comfortable with her family, Ruby didn’t need this to contend with as well. She looked over at Max, trying to judge how she was taking this news, and she looked about as confused and unsettled as Ruby felt.
“I don’t know,” Jade said, getting annoyed in true younger sister fashion. “She happened to be at the concert, we needed a place to crash, that’s all. Are you two going to hog the pool or can we join you?”
“Yeah, sure,” Ruby said, reaching for the noodle that had floated away from her.
CHAPTER 6
That night the Satterwhites, along with Max and Celeste, ate in the formal dining room. Max had gotten out of the pool shortly after Celeste and Jade entered it, and after a shower to rinse off the chlorine, she slicked back her hair into a semi-formal look. It only seemed appropriate for the auspicious atmosphere of the dining room.
The mahogany table was large, almost twice the size of the table in the kitchen they’d eaten at the previous night, and it was polished to a high shine and neatly set with expensive-looking plates and actual crystal water goblets. A cluster of silver candlesticks in the center were lit with taper candles, and Max felt out of place no matter how much time she spent slicking back her hair. Most of her meals back home were consumed on the couch, on melamine plates and in front of a television set.
Max slipped into a heavy, upholstered chair toward the end of the table, next to Ruby who had dressed up for the occasion. She wore lipstick the shade of her namesake and a flowing summer dress, black with large, vibrant yellow flowers that complemented her natural beauty. Max wished she had thought to pack something a bit nicer – all she had was a pair of ironed khakis and a plain white t-shirt. She wasn’t expecting anything like this, and she knew that when Ruby came to visit her in July, they would never need anything fancier than shorts and t-shirts.
Jade and Celeste sat down on the opposite side of the table, both of them glowing from the sun and dressed appropriately for their surroundings. Max wondered how Celeste had gotten the message, or whether this was yet another social expectation that she just didn’t have an innate understanding of like everyone else seemed to.
Lamar carried a massive ceramic serving tray into the room for Lorna, setting it down with gusto before taking his seat at the head of the table. The tray was piled with glistening pork chops, and behind Lamar, Lorna carried in a large bowl of mashed potatoes that smelled like butter and heaven.
Ruby smiled at Max, licking her lips in anticipation of the meal, and Max wondered if there were too many eyes on them to risk resting her hand on Ruby’s thigh beneath the table. She decided not to risk it as Lamar asked, “Are we ready?”
This time, Max remembered the pre-meal ritual and bowed her head with everyone else as Lamar said grace over the meal. She was determined to get through this meal without putting her foot in her mouth, even if it meant saying nothing at all, because according to the schedule she’d made up in her head before she came to Chicago, she was already behind on winning over the Satterwhites and asking Lamar for permission to propose to his daughter.
Lamar concluded his prayer and everyone murmured an amen, Max saying the word a second after everyone else because she just wasn’t used to the ritual yet. Then they all sprang back into action like animatronics that had fallen asleep and then rebooted. They grabbed plates and passed them around, and Celeste said as she scooped a big mound of mashed potatoes onto her plate, “Everything looks fantastic, Lorna.”
Max should have said that – Ruby told her to compliment her mother’s cooking, and she missed the cue.
“Yes,” she added weakly. “It does.”
Ruby used a pair of serving tongs to grab a pork chop for Max, setting it on her plate as she said, “Help yourself, babe. My mama is the best chef in Chicago.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Lorna said, passing around a bowl of fresh green beans with bits of bacon added to the dish.
Max had to resist the urge to agree with her – empirically speaking, unless Lorna had won some kind of award designating her as such, the odds of her being the very best in such a large city were highly unlikely. She wasn’t going to say the first thing that popped into her head tonight, though, or the second. She was going to get through the meal and find a way to make Ruby’s parents like her because there were only four days left to leave them with a good impression of her.
“I’m quite sure she’s right,” Celeste said, smiling at Lorna effortlessly.
If the ship had sailed on charming and personable, which Celeste seemed to be trying to corner the market on, then at least Max could strive to be unobjectionable. She cut into her pork chop and kept her mouth shut.
“So what did you girls do today?” Lamar asked, and the question was directed at all of them, but Ruby was the first to answer.
“Max and I went into the city,” she said. She listed off the different landmarks they’d seen, the mercury blob and the pier and the beach, and told him that he really ought to give the empanada truck a chance – a conversation that seemed like one they must have had in the past.
“Did you drive or take the L?”
“We took the train,” Ruby answered. “It was busy, but the roads would have been impossible on a beautiful day like this with the tourists flocking.”
“Atta girl,” Lamar said, then he turned his attention to Max. “Have you had much occasion to ride on rapid transit in your neck of the woods?”
“No,” she said. “There’s not much demand for rapid anything in a city the size of Granville.”
“What’s the population there?” Lamar asked, and at least this was a black and white question with a specific response.
“About two-hundred thousand,” Max said, eliciting a couple of curious looks around the table. People were always baffled by her recall of statistical information, but numbers just stuck in her head. At least she had a safe answer for Lamar, and it seemed like he had a mind for numbers, too. “Ruby says you work in public transport. Is rapid transit your department?”
“Yes, more broadly my job title is transportation engineer,” Lamar said. “Specifically, I study efficiencies in traffic movements and figure out the bottlenecks and flow issues to get people where they’re going faster.”
“Well, they could use some help with the train,” Max said, figuring this was also safe since Ruby had already mentioned that it was crowded. The truth was that this was an understatement in Max’s eyes. The L was better than trying to navigate the streets, people rushing past her with absolutely no regard for personal space, but it wasn’t better by much. “It was standing room only, very loud, and I was constantly worried that we wouldn’t be able to get to the door to get off at the right stops.”
“Yes,” Lamar said, glancing at Ruby with a look that Max didn’t quite catch. “The L is my primary concern.”
Did she just step on another minefield? It was hard to tell because Lamar was jovial by nature, always smiling no matter what popped out of Max’s mouth, but she thought it was possible she’d just insulted his work. It was time to shut up again and go back to the original plan of just making it through dinner quietly, letting everyone else do the talking. It worked pretty well last night, anyway. Max picked up her knife and sliced into her pork chop while the conversation turned to Jade and Celeste’s weekend in Evanston.
“We were lucky that Megan lived so close to the concert venue,” Jade said, editing out Max’s earlier understanding of the story that their decision to stay in Evanston had been driven by the fact that they were both drunk. “It was so late by the time they were finished playing all their encore numbers, we just crashed on her couch.”
“Evanston is a really nice town,�
�� Celeste volunteered. “We got breakfast in the morning and Megan showed us around the little boutique shops in the afternoon.”
Max gritted her teeth during this. She didn’t want to hear about Ruby’s ex-girlfriend – the one that had come to Granville and tried to seduce her right in front of Max – even if it was just a story about shopping. She was also having trouble finding points of entry to the conversation. Once they’d moved off of Lamar’s work and the numbers-based details surrounding the city, she found it harder and harder to contribute.
The other girls were very talkative, and Ruby fit right in with them, throwing in her two cents about Evanston shopping and dining. Max was best when she could talk to people one-on-one, and the more conversations were occurring at once, the more lost she felt. She was starting to get overwhelmed when Ruby and Lamar broke off into their own side conversation, so she focused on her food, instead.
The pork chop really was delicious, and the more Max’s mouth was occupied, the less she’d be expected to contribute to the conversation. She wondered if she could get through the rest of the week merely by stuffing her mouth full – there was a slim chance that it could work in her favor, winning over Lorna by way of mass consumption of her meals.
Eventually, she zoned out of the conversation entirely. She never knew which conversation to follow, which ones were private, or when to jump in with her own comments. It was hard to pick up five different sets of non-verbal cues all at once, and on top of it all, she was exhausted from a long day in the city, whose crowds offered their own set of challenges. She was ready to just sit passively and watch everyone else for the rest of the meal.
Celeste, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any of Max’s problems. She was obviously the same social butterfly type that Ruby’s family seemed to be, and she didn’t miss a beat assimilating herself into the family dynamic. She didn’t even appear to be trying to become a member of this family, nor did she need to since she was only staying a few weeks longer than Max.
Jealousy stirred in Max’s belly – all she wanted right now was the ability to walk into a room and make friends with people she didn’t know, or have a conversation that hadn’t been fully rehearsed in her head beforehand. Most of the time she was happy being herself, but right now being Celeste seemed far preferable.
***
After the torture of the meal was over, everyone excused themselves to their various evening activities. Jade and Celeste went upstairs to get ready to hit the Chicago night life once again, and Lorna and Lamar retired to the upstairs family room to watch television. That left Ruby and Max alone on the first floor. Ruby had volunteered to clear the table, so they gathered all the plates and carried them into the kitchen.
They stood side-by-side at the sink, washing the crumbs off of plates and silverware and loading up the dishwasher, and Max was quiet because she figured Ruby must be as disappointed in her performance at dinner as she was. She’d be surprised if Ruby hadn’t been comparing Max’s social skills to Celeste’s, too. It was a blatant and unflattering comparison.
After a minute or two of silence, Ruby asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Max lied, and then after a moment of hesitation, she asked, “Are you happy I’m here?”
“Of course,” Ruby said. “Why would you even ask that?”
“I don’t know,” Max answered. She felt completely drained of energy, and it was almost too much work to find the words to explain her question. “I bet you wish I was as good with your parents as Celeste is.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she was this tired. It might have been at the beginning of the year when she was trying to figure out how to approach Ruby. The number of times she felt her energy zapped around Ruby was dwindling down to almost nothing by the end of the school year, but it used to happen a lot. The effort of getting to know someone, figuring out how to read their expressions, their unspoken gestures, and their mannerisms was exhausting. It was so tiring that the only other person Max had ever considered worth the trouble was her best friend, Mira.
“Of course I don’t,” Ruby said, pulling Max into a hug while being careful not to soak her with dish water in the process. “Celeste is probably only good with them because there’s nothing on the line for her – she’s going home in a few weeks and she might never see them again. Babe, you just need to stop trying so hard.”
Max almost let out a snort. The problem was obviously that she wasn’t trying hard enough. “I’m not doing a very good job winning them over.”
Ruby turned the dishwasher on, then changed the subject. “What do you want to do tonight?”
Sleep. Make love. Go home.
Max wondered if Ruby was envious of Jade and Celeste’s evening plans. It was obvious from their foray into the night club scene with Mira last week that she enjoyed going out. Max tried to imagine herself in the middle of the crowded dance floor, the smell of stale beer and body odor wafting through the air while strobe lights overwhelmed her and bodies jostled her back and forth. She couldn’t do it again – not so soon after The Rainbow Room.
“Could we just stay in?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ruby said as she dried her hands on a dish towel, and if she was disappointed, she was doing a good job of hiding it. “Hey, I know something you’ll like.”
She grabbed Max’s hand and led her out of the kitchen, the dishwasher running its cycle behind them. They walked up the foyer and Ruby brought Max to the office she had noticed when they first arrived.
“This is my dad’s office,” Ruby said, pulling Max into the center of the room, “and it’s where I first started to love books.”
From this new vantage point near the large desk, Max saw that two of the four walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, each one packed to capacity with leather-bound volumes. Max gravitated to the shelves, reading titles, while Ruby leaned against the desk and watched her. She was right – Max loved this, and if she could seclude herself in here for the rest of the week, pouring over the volumes, she would be perfectly happy.
Ruby provided commentary as Max moved around the perimeter of the room. “When I was a kid, my dad was still earning his master’s degree and a lot of nights after dinner he’d be in here studying or writing papers. I would come in and want to play with him, but he had to get his work done so he’d sit me down in that armchair by the window and pick a book off the shelves for me to read while he worked. I remember feeling so grown up, working my way diligently through thick novels while my dad worked on his thesis a few feet away.”
“How many books are here?” Max asked, running her finger over one of the spines.
“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “A couple thousand at least.”
“How many of them have you read?” Max asked. Habitually, she started counting one of the shelves to estimate the library’s size.
“A few dozen,” Ruby said. “There aren’t many that are kid-friendly in this collection, but my dad has read most of them.”
Then she came over to Max, putting one hand on her shoulder.
“Max, you know my parents don’t hate you, right?”
“I haven’t made a single good impression since we got here,” Max countered. “I’m not exactly good at it. Do you remember your first impression of me?”
“I do,” Ruby said, letting Max put her hands on her hips as they spoke. “That’s why I brought it up, because I love you now. It just took a little time for us both to warm up to each other.”
Ruby leaned into Max, but her eyes darted frequently toward the open door. Max wanted nothing more than to finish what they’d begun in the pool, and her chances seemed better now since Ruby’s parents were upstairs and Jade and Celeste would soon be out of the house for the night. She pulled Ruby closer and leaned in for a kiss – this was more like the way she had envisioned their summer together, and she hoped the moment would last.
She longed for Ruby’s lips, and the softness of her skin, and the scent of her
. They could barely keep their hands off each other in Granville, but here Max could hardly get a moment alone with her in this huge house. She missed Ruby’s body, her lips, and she needed to know that Ruby still wanted her just as badly.
As Max nuzzled her face into the crook of Ruby’s neck, she let out the softest of moans. Her hand started to inch upward from Ruby’s hip to her side, and her thumb had just grazed the curve of Ruby’s breast when someone cleared their throat in the doorway. Ruby nearly jumped out of her skin, pushing Max’s hand away like it was on fire, and Max turned to see that for the second time that day, they’d been interrupted by Ruby’s kid sister.
“Hey,” Ruby said, blushing. “Are you two heading out?”
“Yeah,” Jade said. “I’m just waiting for Celeste to finish straightening her hair.”
She came into the room, glancing around at the bookshelves like she was surprised that there was anything of interest here for Ruby and Max to entertain themselves with. She was wearing a tight black dress and heels that were so tall Max thought it would be a miracle if she came home without two sprained ankles. If the place they were going was anything like The Rainbow Room, she’d be stumbling all over the dance floor in those.
“What are you doing tonight?” Jade asked. “Do you want to join us?”
Ruby glanced at Max, a split second of hesitation that betrayed her desire to get out of the house, but then she said, “No, we’re going to hang around here tonight. We had a long day of tourism and we’re beat.”
“Suit yourselves,” Jade said with a shrug. Max couldn’t help wondering if Megan would be making an appearance tonight, considering that the three of them were such good friends now. Jade walked behind her father’s desk and said, “Wow, I haven’t been in this room in ages. It looks like dad’s collection has grown.”
Ruby looped her arm around Max’s waist and asked, “What’s your favorite book, sis?”