Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “At six? You figured all of that out when you were six? That’s not possible.”

  “It’s not only possible, it’s true.” Taffy was relaxed, conversational. For her this was the friendliest exchange we had had in years. “We divided everything right down the middle: I was popular, you were smart. I jumped horses, you danced. I got Mother, you got Dad. If I was good in something, you never even went near it. If you were good at something, I gave it up.”

  “You got Mother, I got Dad?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  It was, but for the life of me I’d never thought of it that way. Little Henrietta, so named to be the son my father wanted, never interested my father a whit. I was the one who went to basketball games, who sat beneath his desk and read books when he had to go into the office and work on Saturday. Somehow I managed to be both a ballerina and the son he’d always wanted. For my mother, however, I was a colossal disappointment and my sister was the bright and shining star. “How did I miss that?”

  “I have no idea.” Taffy stretched up her arms and tapped out a little combination—hop left, flap right, flap left, flap right, shuffle left, shuffle right. She threw in a couple of double/triple-time steps. Without anyone else in the room, without the music, her feet made a beautiful, startling noise.

  “So you took dance classes?”

  “For a while, when I was in my forties. My therapist told me to. She said it was the only way to take back what you had stolen from me. Those were her words, not mine. I didn’t actually think of it that way. But I liked the classes. I dropped them after a while—you know how it is. You get busy and then later on you pick up something else, water aerobics or something.”

  “How long did you take the classes?”

  She shrugged. “On and off, about ten years.”

  “You danced for ten years? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I wasn’t dancing. Not like you were dancing. I guess the therapist didn’t solve the problem. I never thought she was very good anyway. Whenever I took a class, I just felt like I was trying to imitate you, and that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Anyway, who cares? This is all ancient history. I only came today because I was sure I had forgotten it all.”

  “Your feet betrayed you.”

  Taffy laughed. “First Neddy, then my feet. It makes me wonder what’s coming next. Maybe Stamp will bite me.”

  “Never happen.”

  “Really, that would be the end.”

  “So you’ll come back for another class, an adult class.”

  “I like the little girls.”

  “So come to both. Come to all of them. You can dance your heart out.”

  Taffy walked across the empty studio, her shoes clicking loudly with every step. My taps were off. I never could walk around in tap shoes. “What difference does it make now? I’m a little old to take up dancing.”

  I could see it all as if it were in front of me, Mother and Taffy heading out to shop, their hair curled, their sweaters matching, and I never cared because that meant I would be with my father, whose company I in every way preferred. “Everybody with any sense would like to be able to dance. It makes a difference because after Tom and the kids, there’s nothing in my life that’s made me as happy as dancing. I think dancing is just about the greatest thing in the world, so if I kept you away from that, even if I didn’t know I was doing it, then I want to make that right.”

  “Oh, you knew you were doing it all right. And I knew when I was doing it to you.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. We stepped outside into an early-evening drizzle and I locked the door behind us. “Fair enough.”

  WE STOPPED OFF on the way home and picked up Chinese. I felt guilty about not making dinner on Taffy’s first night in town, but it was already too late to start cooking. When we got back to the house, our arms full of take-out bags, Woodrow was sitting at the kitchen table with Stamp lying on the floor near his feet. Stamp was attached to a leash, the handle of which was tied around one of the legs of the table. When we came in the door, he sat up and barked once but Woodrow held out his hand.

  “Ah,” he said. Stamp put his head back on the floor and whined, the stump of a tail beating time against the floor. He was desperate to jump on Taffy.

  “Why is Stamp tied up?” Taffy said.

  “Because he tried to bite me,” Woodrow said.

  I put down the Chinese food and rubbed my eyes. I had forgotten to shut the bedroom door. “Oh, God, Woodrow. I’m sorry.” I gave Stamp a sharp look but he only wagged.

  “He didn’t bite me,” Woodrow said. “He tried but did not succeed.”

  “See,” Taffy said, bending down in front of her dog. “He doesn’t bite.”

  “Oh, he bites. He bit Kevin who does the drywall. That’s why we’re having a little training session.”

  “Is Kevin all right?” Maybe I was lucky to be in a family of lawyers. I pictured lots of lawsuits during Taffy’s visit.

  “He’s fine. Stamp here only tore up his jeans.”

  Taffy rubbed Stamp’s ears. Woodrow asked her politely to stop. “He’s thinking about how it’s best not to bite people right now. He needs to focus on that.”

  “You can’t just train another person’s dog,” Taffy said.

  “I can if he’s biting the men on my crew. We’re in and out of this house all day. We can’t do that if there’s a dangerous dog here, and if we leave the job, then, your sister’s living room is going to wind up in her basement pretty soon.”

  “Don’t leave. Don’t even talk about leaving.” Woodrow was gone too much as it was. I believed that my house was unraveling and that he was the only thing that was holding it together. Without Woodrow our property value would be equal to a box of toothpicks. Every day new cracks were showing up in corners.

  “Do you know how to train dogs?” Taffy stood up and stepped back from Stamp. He started to cry, but Woodrow put up his hand and said, “Ah,” again.

  “My father trained dogs. It was my brother who took over the business, but I got a good look at what was going on. My father had dogs that could work math problems and serve coffee. They were the smartest, best-behaved dogs you ever saw in your life.”

  “Stamp had a trainer when he was a puppy,” Taffy said hesitantly. “But he didn’t take to the classes. My nutritionist told me that some dogs can have attention deficit disorder.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Woodrow said. “But fortunately, that’s not the case with Stamp, here. Stamp has no problem paying attention once you explain the rules to him.”

  About that time Tom and Kay walked in and Stamp lunged forward with such purpose that the whole table jerked forward a couple of inches. A sharp ridge of hair shot up on his back and he flashed his teeth. Tom stepped back into the hallway, pulling Kay along with him. Woodrow stood up.

  “Ah!” he said sharply.

  Stamp lay back down again, but he kept his eyes on Tom.

  “You didn’t hit Stamp while we were gone?” Taffy said suspiciously.

  “I certainly hope somebody did,” Tom said, leaning cautiously back into the kitchen. “There’s no way he can get out of his collar, is there?”

  “There is no call to hit a dog,” Woodrow said. “You never hit anything that’s beneath you. That’s what my father always said.”

  “Well, my father always said, Never bite the man who’s letting you sleep in the guest room,” Kay said.

  I gave Tom a considerably less meaningful kiss. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little sore.”

  “Well, sit down for a while. I’ll get you a scotch and you can pour it on your leg if you want to.”

  Tom went to sit down at the kitchen table, but Stamp started growling again. Woodrow got up and shortened the leash by several inches so that there was no way the dog could get anywhere near Tom.

  “That can’t be comfortable for him,” Taffy said. “He isn’t used to being confined.”
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  “You can put him in the bedroom if you want, but he needs to learn to be around people without biting them. This is the only way he’s going to learn it.”

  Very tentatively, Tom sat down at the opposite end of the table from Stamp and put his leg up on a chair. We all watched the dog to see what would happen next.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Kay said. “But may we stop talking about Stamp for five minutes?”

  “It’s a good point. All this attention doesn’t help things, either. Kay”—Woodrow stood up and pulled out a chair for her—“come sit down here and tell me more about those wedding dresses you were looking at this morning.”

  “Actually,” Kay said, hoisting her briefcase onto the table, “Mrs. Bennett came by the office this afternoon and dropped off some sample invitations.”

  “I didn’t get to meet her?” Tom said.

  “You were in court,” Kay said. “We stood in the back and watched you for a minute but she needed to get going.”

  “She has sample wedding invitations lying around?” This particular point seemed stranger to me than her not meeting Tom.

  “They were from Trey’s sister’s wedding last year. She bought the sample book because she said you never know when you’re going to need that sort of thing.” Kay pulled out stacks of creamy off-white cards in giant envelopes. Everything about the paper said important document. It was the kind of paper that should have been used for the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the marriage of the eldest Bennett son.

  Taffy came over and ran one finger over the engraving. “This is very nice.”

  “Mrs. Bennett—Lila, she wants me to call her Lila, but I don’t think I can—Mrs. Bennett said it wasn’t too early to start thinking about these sorts of things.”

  “Why can’t you call her Lila?” Tom said. I handed him a drink and he accepted it with gratitude.

  Woodrow picked up the stack of cards and started going through them. He was holding them with his arm straight out and squinting at them, so I took my glasses off my head and handed them to him. “Oh, that’s better,” he said.

  “Are you the contractor, dog trainer, wedding consultant?” Taffy asked him. Her tone was neither kind nor unkind. She just wanted to know.

  “Woodrow has gotten three of his four girls married,” Kay said. “And he made most of the arrangements himself. He has a lot of experience with weddings.”

  “But more experience with dogs.” Woodrow looked at each invitation carefully and then divided them into piles. “I’ve had many more dogs in my life than I ever had daughters.”

  “What about your wife? Didn’t she help to plan the weddings?”

  Woodrow smiled and put the cards down. “My wife died when the girls were still in school. That’s why I wanted the weddings to be especially nice. I wanted them to be the kind of weddings they would have had if their mother had still been alive.”

  “Oh,” Taffy said, looking down at the envelopes. “Of course.”

  “I’m going to put out some dinner,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “Everything is casual. Woodrow, you’ll stay for dinner?”

  Woodrow nodded. “I live here, don’t I?”

  Suddenly, Stamp was barking again and the table was hopping across the room behind him like an oversized dogsled. Woodrow got halfway out of his seat and Stamp lay down and whined.

  “It looks like somebody’s been a very bad dog,” George said as he came into the kitchen. Clearly, he had never gotten around to changing clothes after dance class. He was wearing sneakers, a leather jacket, and his tights. He looked like James Dean trying out for Swan Lake.

  “You’re just in time for dinner,” I said. I had raised four children, three boys, and I knew how to buy food. I bought lots of it, more than I could ever imagine needing, because in the end somebody always ate it. You never knew who was going to show up and how many people they’d have with them. George had not come home alone. He’d brought Jack with him, or, as he was commonly known at our house, Jack from the D.A.’s office.

  “My timing is perfect,” George said.

  “Jack,” Kay said.

  “Jack,” George said. “Of course you know my parents. This is Woodrow, who is rebuilding the house, and this is my aunt, Taffy. I ran into Jack on my way home.”

  “The D.A.’s office is on your way home?” Tom said.

  George didn’t appear to be listening. “I told him Kay was getting married and he wanted to come and congratulate her. Now he can stay for dinner. Jack didn’t know that Kay was getting married.”

  “It only happened last night,” Kay said. I thought she looked a little pale.

  But Jack didn’t seem pale at all. If George was trying to shake up his sister, then Jack was on his side all the way. He walked right up to Kay and kissed her forehead. “This is wonderful news,” he said. Then he picked up her hand and whistled. It was a very sincere whistle. “Now, that says Engagement.”

  “I haven’t seen the ring,” George said. He took his sister’s hand away from Jack and held it up. “What is this? He asked you to marry him and he gave you a flashlight?”

  “Stop it,” Kay said through her teeth.

  “So you’ve set the date?” Jack said.

  Kay shook her head. “This only just happened.”

  “But you have the invitations already.”

  “Samples,” Kay said. Her voice was weak.

  Jack picked one up and looked inside the envelope as if it might contain something illegal. He sniffed it. “I’ll be the first one in the church. I always like to get a seat on the aisle so I can see the bride.”

  Even though the D.A.s and the P.D.s were on opposite sides of the fence, they were all county employees and they had the look of county employees, which is to say that Jack looked like a guy who slept in his suit. I could see about two inches of tie coming out of his coat pocket. He needed a shave. It was a look I found endearing since I had spent a long time looking at it on Tom.

  “I imagine it will be a big wedding,” Jack said.

  “Oh, pretty big,” Kay said. She didn’t seem interested in talking about sleeves or invitations anymore. She looked very much like someone who wanted to go back to the office and do paperwork until four in the morning.

  “How big?” Jack said. “I know it’s early but, ballpark, what are we talking about here?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kay said.

  “But if your future mother-in-law dropped off the invitations, she must have mentioned a figure to you,” Taffy said, picking up on the line of questioning.

  “Even a very rough figure,” Jack said.

  Taffy picked up one of the envelopes. “How many people were at her daughter’s wedding last year?”

  Kay waited for a minute as if she were trying to tally up a list of names in her head and come up with a number. “Maybe six hundred.”

  “Six hundred people?” Tom said.

  “Maybe a few more than that.”

  I felt my hand clutch the counter. Six hundred bread-and-butter plates? Six hundred place cards? Six hundred slices of cake? Was that even possible? Who knew six hundred people?

  “I’m starving,” George said. “Should we go ahead and eat?”

  chapter seven

  AND SO IT WAS DINNER FOR SEVEN: TAFFY, MY SISTER, whose husband had left her; Kay, my daughter, who was marrying Trey Bennett; Jack from the D.A.’s office, who was sleeping with Kay; George, my son, who had brought Jack over to torment Kay; Woodrow, the widowed contractor who was trying to save our house; Tom, my husband, who had two puncture wounds in his right calf from my sister’s dog, Stamp, who was tied beneath the table; and me. Seven. There was room for all of us. There was even an extra chair so Tom could keep his leg up. There were so many white paper cartons on the table that someone who was just dropping in might have thought that we were in the business of manufacturing them. We were used to having this many people for dinner, but this exact combination was a new one for everybody.

/>   “I think I’d like a drink,” Kay said. “Does anybody else want some wine?”

  Jack raised his hand.

  “Red,” she said.

  “Just bring it all to the table,” I said.

  Kay came back with two bottles of white and two of red. The corkscrew was stuck into the waistband of her skirt and she immediately devoted herself to the business of getting all of the bottles open.

  “White,” Taffy said. Tom handed her a bottle. She filled her glass up to the top and then filled up Woodrow’s glass without asking him if he wanted any. “This is nice, the big kitchen, the big kitchen table. Mother always said that eating in the kitchen was strictly for the help, but I think that it’s very charming.”

  “That’s why I always eat in the kitchen,” Woodrow said. “At least when I’m here.”

  “Taffy, that’s awful. Did Mother really say that?”

  “It was something like that. Neddy and I always made a point of eating in the dining room, but then half the time he didn’t make it home for dinner. I thought I needed to have some consistency, so when he was off working, or doing God knows what, I’d eat in the dining room by myself. It’s a huge room.”

  “The most wasted space in a house,” Woodrow said. “When people are building, I always tell them to cut back on the dining room. At least you made an effort to use your dining room.”

  “I only use my dining room for addressing our Christmas cards,” I said, which was an exaggeration but not too far from the truth.

  “Now you can use it for addressing the wedding invitations,” Jack said.

  “They pay someone to do that,” George said.

  “Stop it,” Kay said.

  “Do you build houses?” Taffy asked.

  “We build some houses. We do renovations, repairs. I like to think we can do whatever needs to be done.”

  “What’s going on here, anyway? There’s all this work, but I can’t really tell what’s happening.”

  “Six hundred people,” Jack said.

  “Maybe a few more than that,” George reminded him.