One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  “So?” she said. “Did you seduce him like I told you to?”

  “Lyss, you can’t ask stuff like that,” Jacqueline said.

  “You want to know too. You know you do.”

  “I don’t want to know that.” Jacqueline hooked her bob behind her ear, revealing a tasteful pearl earring. She was in full professional mode. Fifty minutes for lunch doesn’t give you long enough to get out of it. “But y’all are okay, right?”

  I stuck on the Mr. Potato Head smile. “If you mean is the wedding still on, yes.”

  “It never got that bad,” Alyssa said. “Y’all never fight like that.”

  Her head bobbed like a dashboard dachshund.

  “I love how you tell her the way it is when you don’t even know,” Jacqueline said.

  I actually did love it. It kept me from having to answer.

  “I had my final fitting,” I said.

  “Is that dress gorgeous on you?” Alyssa said. “I bet it’s gorgeous on you.”

  “Was Calla there?” Jacqueline said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was she fabulous?”

  My guffaw was genuine. “Of course she was.”

  “Just ask her. She’ll tell you.” Alyssa spread her fingers. Jazz hands, Lexi called them. “I could not believe that day we went in there to try on the bridesmaids’ dresses and I asked her if she got me a size two and she goes, ‘No. You’re a four.’ And I go, ‘I have never worn a four in my life,’ and she says, ‘Sweetie, it’ll be fabulous.’ ”

  Neither Jacqueline nor I reminded her that the four fit her like a second skin. At the time Jacqueline, a decent size six, rolled her eyes completely into her head and Lexi, a size zero, convinced her the dresses ran small.

  “What would be fabulous right now would be our food getting here.” Jacqueline glanced at her cell phone. “I only have twenty minutes left.”

  Alyssa went on as if Jacqueline were invisible. “Okay, here’s another thing I would hate about you, Tara, if I didn’t love you so much.”

  I knew my face was incredulous.

  “You are never going to have to work. In your whole life you’re never going to have to give directions to Juliet Gordon Low’s birthplace for the five thousandth time or”—she waved a hand in Jacqueline’s direction—“try to convince people that Savannah is a great place to visit when it’s a hundred and two degrees outside.”

  “I’m not just going to sit on my tail,” I said.

  “Well, right,” Jacqueline said. “But you can if you want to. How late did you sleep in this morning?”

  My mouth was feeling like the Mojave and I’d long since licked the gloss from my lips. I had gotten up at seven, but I hadn’t been asleep since three when images of Seth, alone but not alone in a hotel room, thrashed their way into my dreams.

  “I don’t want to know,” Alyssa said. “Then I’ll really want to hate how much I can’t hate you.”

  “That didn’t even make any sense,” Jacqueline said.

  I was overjoyed to see lunch arrive, even though I didn’t want to eat it.

  One thing struck me as I reviewed that scene for editing on my walk home: neither of them seemed to notice that anything was going on with me. Either I was about to go up for an Oscar, or they didn’t look past the words that came out of my mouth.

  Somehow both of those options were depressing.

  My mother knew I was off, of course, but she still didn’t ask me. She just kept sounding like a cheery newscaster on speed. My father, I knew, could be a whole different thing. Fortunately I didn’t see him much until Thursday night, when he came in from work just as Mama was warming up plates of chicken cordon bleu left over from the night before. I’d planned to take mine up to my room and maybe in the dead of night go out and bury it in the backyard, but he was so insistent that I join them in the small dining room—as opposed to the formal one—I didn’t have the heart to beg off.

  That was the thing about Daddy . . . and let me stop there and say that Daddy is what every well-bred Southern girl calls her father. I point that out because my first week as a freshman at Chapel Hill, when I told my roommate I needed to call my daddy, she said, “Daddy? What are you, five?”

  “What do you call your father?” I said.

  “Eric,” she said.

  I couldn’t even conjure up a scene in a horror movie where I would call my daddy Dennis. She was from California. I decided she didn’t know any better.

  Back to the thing about Daddy: I loved that man. I was told that when I was a baby, he was the first person I ever reached my arms out to. His name was the first intelligible word I uttered. As a toddler I pitched fits consolable only with massive amounts of graham crackers every time I watched him leave the house.

  I eventually stopped having tantrums and got used to the fact that he was always off to work already when I got up and was seldom at the dinner table with Kellen and me. I learned to live for Saturday mornings, because that was when he focused on being a dad. He made pancakes you could use to stuff couch cushions, but I stuffed them in my mouth while he asked me about my week. And then I climbed into his lap and waited for whatever plan he had for us for the day. He always had one, and it almost always involved Forsyth Park or Hilton Head or a massive pizza feast after Kellen’s and my respective sports games, where he cheered and whistled through his teeth as if either one of us was any good at them.

  Saturdays were what I had with Daddy, or at least parts of them when Kellen and I got interested in different things and he divided himself between us with the skill of the executive he was. But the three-week summer vacations were always taken together, the four of us, and no one reveled in a family Christmas the way my father did. He was the one who had suggested a holiday wedding to Seth and me. It would bring the entire clan together, he said. And he literally beamed.

  At the moment that thought cast me into a shadow. I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to pull this off with GrandMary. She was even more perceptive than my mother and not one to pretend whatever was there wasn’t.

  Bless my mother for still keeping up her running commentary on anything she could think of. For the first ten minutes we were eating, Daddy barely had a chance to look at me. I did look at him, though.

  Dennis Faulkner is what women call an attractive man, because they find themselves, well, attracted to him even though he isn’t classically handsome. The way Seth is. I know that because Randi Grissom explained it to me when I was sixteen and our families were vacationing together on Amelia Island. As I watched my father teaching skinny eleven-year-old Evelyn how to body surf, I commented that he looked like Harrison Ford.

  “No,” she said to me. “He isn’t good looking enough. Not technically.”

  “Yes, he is!” I said.

  Randi looked at me over the tops of her sunglasses. “Don’t get your bikini in a bunch, Tara. I didn’t say he was ugly. What you’re seeing is his charisma. It doesn’t matter that he’s losing his hair and his chin juts out a skosh too far. He has an energy that a lot of men with perfect profiles don’t have.”

  In those days I believed most of what Randi Grissom said. But even now, I still think she was right about that. Daddy has a vitality that takes control of a room without minimizing anyone else in it.

  Did he ever look at porn?

  My fork clattered onto my plate, and both Mama and Daddy jerked their heads toward me.

  “You okay, sugar?” Daddy said.

  I stared at him, into his Faulkner-blue eyes, deep into those eyes. No. No, this man didn’t even think—wouldn’t even be tempted—what was I even thinking?

  I picked up my fork and stabbed the innocent chicken breast as if it were trying to fly off my plate. I was going to wonder about every man I knew now, wasn’t I? And every man I met. Or saw at the grocery store picking out his cantaloupe. For the rest of my life.

  “Tara?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “That got cold, didn’t it?” Mama sai
d, nodding at my plate. “Let me warm it up.”

  “Mama, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s great. Go on with what you were saying.”

  Daddy shook his head. “Not that your mother isn’t fascinating—”

  “Thank you, darlin’.”

  “But I want to know about you.” Daddy nudged my arm with his knuckles. “Do you have that house ready for Southern Living magazine yet?”

  “Almost,” I said. “The rest of the furniture’s being delivered Monday.”

  “She’s having her own library and study,” Mama said.

  “All right, and what does Seth get—the man’s usual fifteen inches on the couch?”

  Mama batted at him with her napkin. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “You never heard that?” Daddy said, eyes practically doing the cha-cha. “All your average husband needs is fifteen inches in the bed and fifteen inches on the couch and he’s happy.”

  “How about the fifteen inches at the table?” Mama said. “And can I just say that you take up way more than fifteen inches in that bed.”

  “You know what?” I said. “I think I will warm this up.”

  “I can do that for you . . .”

  With my mother’s protests fading away in the dining room, I hit the kitchen, where I poked a few buttons on the empty microwave, dumped my plate into the garbage, and fled up the back stairs to my bedroom.

  Seth returned to Savannah late Friday afternoon with barely enough time to shower and change before our dinner reservation.

  “I’m taking you to the Mirage,” he’d told me when he called from the airport that morning.

  “You don’t have to court me, Seth.” I heard the edge in my voice and I tried to soften it. “I’m still marrying you.”

  “I’m never going to stop courting you,” he told me.

  What he didn’t tell me was what I found out when I went to the townhouse to give him some extra time. I hadn’t been there since Sunday night, and I shivered when I crossed the living room. It had never seemed hollow before, even without furniture, and that made me feel even colder.

  Seth greeted me at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a black shirt that fit as if his muscles had given him permission to put it on. If his mother had said he wasn’t technically handsome we would have a serious discussion. Even now.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

  He pulled me into a kiss that was long and lovely, and I let it be both. I melted into him because frankly I was tired of fighting off how much I loved him. He’d dropped a big black cloud in the middle of my vision, but if I walked through it, he would still be there. He still held me and whispered that he loved me and held me some more.

  I only pulled back far enough to search his eyes. “Is it really over?” I said. “Are you really done?”

  Seth held my face with his hands, fingers tangled in my hair. “I’ve done everything I promised. I’ve talked to Gavin Johnson twice this week, and he says I’m golden. But”—he kissed the place between my eyebrows I knew I was pinching in—“I’m going to keep seeing him until the wedding. I want to be clean for you.”

  I believed him because his eyes weren’t lying to me. I believed him because his voice was rich with the tears he was obviously holding back. I believed him because I wanted to.

  “We should go,” he said. “I want us to get there first.”

  “First?” I said.

  “We’re the hosts. We should get there before—”

  “Hosts of what?” I wiggled my shoulders. “Do you have a surprise for me?”

  Seth kissed my nose and let me go. He reached for his jacket, which hung on the banister. “It’s more a surprise for them.”

  “Who?”

  “My new staff,” he said. “Didn’t you bring a jacket? You’re always freezing—”

  “Your whole staff is going to be there. From GC.”

  “I want them to meet you. A couple of them you’ve already met—”

  “No,” I said. The back of my neck prickled.

  Seth stopped ushering me toward the front door. “No—what?”

  “No, I can’t go to dinner with the people you work with. Not tonight.”

  Just as they’d been doing in every scene I’d lived through with Seth in the past six days, the words marched out of my mouth before I thought them and with more force than either of us expected. I could tell that from the irritation in Seth’s eyes.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “I can’t sit down at a table full of people and act like everything is okay.”

  “I thought it was okay.”

  “It’s going to be okay. I think it is—it is—but Seth, you can’t expect me to just turn off what I saw and pretend it doesn’t make any difference—”

  “It doesn’t!”

  “Yes, it does!”

  Seth let his jacket go against the wall and stabbed his hands onto his hips. “Is it going to be like this from now on? Are you going to throw it in my face every freakin’ minute?”

  “No, but right now—”

  “You said right now Monday. And Tuesday. And every day. When are you going to get over it?”

  “Get over it?”

  Seth locked his hands behind his head and stared at the floor. I could see him reining himself in. “I’m not expecting you to forget overnight,” he said finally. “Maybe you won’t be able to forget at all. But I did think you could forgive me.”

  It was a new thought. Clearly I hadn’t gotten that far.

  “Do you?” he said.

  I had no idea what that would even look like, although I knew it didn’t look like this. Me suspecting that every aberration from the plan was because he was using again. Me reframing every sweet gesture as a gift he’d brought back to me from his guilt trip. Me putting off facing the world together just because he’d made a mistake.

  Forgiveness didn’t look like that.

  So I said, “Yes. I forgive you.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “Okay. So can we do this? Please?”

  “We can,” I said.

  I got through the dinner only because my mama and daddy raised me to take my social graces to every occasion and behave appropriately. A lot of people assume that if you come from money you’ve been cosseted and indulged into bratdom. That didn’t happen at the Faulkner house. Kellen and I were brought up to appreciate what we had and never to consider ourselves better than anyone else. Mama was the one who told us what people would assume about us and that we should always surprise them.

  That was how I managed the introductions and the toasts and the female foray into the ladies’ room between courses. Fortunately all any of the other women seemed interested in was the wedding. I had been talking about it for so long I didn’t have to formulate answers. They just came out like the Pledge of Allegiance, while inside I was still fighting a civil war.

  “You were awesome,” Seth said to me when he walked me home.

  The December evening was black-velvet soft and the single white candles set in windows for the holidays winked at us like approving aunts. Go ahead, they seemed to say. Love him.

  “You were, too, darlin’,” I said.

  He was. While I was acting like the corporate wife my mama raised me to be, I saw that Seth was almost the polished businessman my father was, and I did feel proud. Obviously his staff respected him—laughing at his quips because they were actually funny, tilting forward to listen because he honestly had something intelligent to say, watching him with admiring eyes because he had an authentic aura of confidence they clearly found irresistible. Especially the women.

  “That little bookkeeper, what’s her name?” I said. “The one that up-talks? All the time?”

  He grinned. “You mean Candace?”

  “Yeah. She has a crush on you.”

  Seth stopped under one of the streetlights on Madison Square made to look like a nineteenth-century gaslight. A holiday garland had been wrapped around its black pole and tied at
the top with a red faux-velveteen ribbon. He leaned against it and twirled one of my curls around his finger.

  “Do you have a crush on me?” he said, eyes twinkling.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Because I’d had one for so long, it was automatic. Because if I said it I might truly feel it again. And because I just didn’t want to fight anymore.

  We actually didn’t fight that weekend. There wasn’t much chance because GrandMary arrived, and Saturday and Sunday were all about family. The whole family.

  Randi and Paul had us at their house for brunch on Saturday morning. Mimosas. Eggs Benedict. Smoked salmon. That afternoon it was tea for us girls—even the always inexplicably disgruntled Evelyn—at the Ballastone Inn with GrandMary presiding as matriarch over the silver tea service. Saturday night Mama brought in John Mark and his people, the group she used for special dinner parties, and we were all at the table until ten p.m., at which point the men retired to Daddy’s study and we ladies went over the wedding plans yet again in the adjacent parlor. It was like an episode of Downton Abbey.

  With so many people adhering to such a tight party schedule, I didn’t have to have too many one-on-one conversations with anyone. Including my grandmother. But Saturday night, when we were climbing to the fourth floor to go to bed, she said to me, “Tomorrow morning. Eight a.m. My room. Bring the coffee.”

  Just when I’d started sleeping again.

  I spent half the night in the window seat creating and scrapping scenes.

  Take One . . .

  GRANDMARY: What’s wrong, baby girl?

  TARA: I caught Seth having cybersex, GrandMary.

  GRANDMARY: I’m appalled. Cancel the wedding at once.

  Take Two . . .

  TARA: Seth has a sexual issue, GrandMary.

  GRANDMARY: Baby girl, what man doesn’t have some kind of issue? Marriage is about making a go of it in spite of the issues.

  TARA: What does that mean?

  GRANDMARY: It means put your big-girl panties on, Tara.

  Take Three . . .

  GRANDMARY: What is it, baby girl?

  TARA: I don’t know what you mean. I’m fine, GrandMary.