Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s in nursing school.”

  “Why didn’t anybody mention this to me before? Woodrow never said a thing to me.” He looked at me and pointed his finger. “You never said a thing to me.”

  “It’s rude to point,” I said, pushing his finger aside. “And Woodrow mentioned Erica not two weeks ago. You just weren’t listening.” I put down my coffee and went to the back door. “Erica, could you come here a minute?”

  Erica smiled. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it was a fairly dazzling smile. She leaned her shovel up against the truck. Her father was already down in the basement. “You haven’t met my sister and my son.”

  “Oh, hey,” she said, holding out her hand to Taffy. “I’ve heard so many nice things about you. My dad talks about you all the time.”

  “He does?” Taffy said.

  “Oh, it’s Caroline’s sister this and Caroline’s sister that. And this must be Stamp.”

  We had all forgotten about Stamp. He had been completely silent when Erica came in, but now he rolled over on his back and let her scratch his belly. “What a good dog you are,” she said.

  George waited his turn.

  “This is my son George,” I said.

  Erica stood up and wiped her hand on her shirt. “Excuse me, I have dog hands now. Hello, George,” she said, and smiled again.

  At that moment, if she had said, George, I think we should get in that truck and drive to California for lunch, he would have gone. “Hello,” George said.

  She might have stayed longer, but George didn’t come up with anything after hello. “Well, it was great to meet you both. Thanks for calling me in. I should get back to work, though. I’m on the clock.”

  “Do you need some help?” George said.

  “Working?” Erica said.

  “I could carry your shovels downstairs or something. I mean, I live here. I should at least try to help.”

  Erica laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Sure,” she said, “if you want to.” They were walking out the door when Erica stopped and turned around. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just realized that I don’t know your name.”

  “Taffy Bishop.”

  “Taffy,” Erica said, and smiled again. “Isn’t that funny that Dad always calls you Caroline’s sister?” She waved and then the two of them went off to the truck.

  Taffy looked out the window and then looked at me. “Well,” she said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, she’s—” She didn’t say the word black, she only mouthed it.

  “Either he teaches at the dance studio and winds up gay or he goes out with Erica Woodrow,” I said. “Take your pick.”

  Through the window we watched Erica pick up the shovel again, but George took it away from her. He was talking and talking and pretty soon he put the shovel back into the truck. Erica looked like she was listening, but it was impossible to tell by the expression on her face whether or not she liked what she was hearing.

  “Can you tell what he’s saying?” Taffy asked.

  “No idea.”

  George lifted his hands. He put his feet in fifth position and then went up on his toes. Erica started laughing.

  “Looks like he’s trying to impress her,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Really, I think George has amazing luck with this.”

  Woodrow came up the basement stairs. When he saw what was going on he came over and stood with us. Stamp whined a little bit until Woodrow reached down and rubbed his ears, but soon he was looking out the window again. It was as if we were watching a flock of especially dazzling birds who had landed on the feeder, streaks of sunlight reflecting off of bright blue feathers. “What is this about?” he asked.

  “Court and spark,” I said.

  “Is he supposed to be dancing?” Woodrow said.

  “Caroline thinks that goes over big,” Taffy told him.

  Woodrow leaned forward. “I never tried that myself.”

  Then Erica looked up and saw the group of us staring. She slapped George on the shoulder and he immediately put both of his feet flat on the ground and shrugged. They each picked up a shovel and walked away.

  Woodrow shook his head. “I’ll be damned.” He walked over and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  “If they fall in love and get married, you’ll have to give us the family discount,” I said.

  “One conversation and you’re marrying them off?” Taffy said.

  “A person gets on a roll,” Woodrow said.

  Actually, George’s love life was the furthest thing from my mind, but it was a comfort to know that if anything happened, Woodrow would be the one picking up the tab for the wedding.

  AS FOR THE issue of that other wedding, I am ashamed to say that we had done absolutely nothing but worry ourselves sick over the whole thing. Every day Tom and I decided to call the Bennetts and explain our limitations to them, and every day we managed an admirable stall. A family’s limitations seemed an especially private matter, and I wasn’t any too eager to lay mine bare in front of people I didn’t know. Instead I found myself trying to navigate the tricky extra bonus stamps on the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes entry form.

  “This isn’t the answer,” Tom said, picking up a series of color-coded coupons that had to be matched to a set of numbers that could only be found by reading ten pages of micro-print. It would have been easier to file a hospital claim with our health insurance.

  “What is the answer?”

  “We call them.”

  “You know where the phone is,” I said, going back to my forms.

  Tom looked at the phone. It sat quietly on the kitchen table, goading us. “Maybe we should meet with the accountant first. That way we would know what we could offer to pay, realistically.”

  That seemed like a very reasonable plan to me. Tom was more than happy to call the accountant. An appointment was made and the stall was comfortably extended.

  KAY, ON THE other hand, seemed a bundle of purpose and direction. She came by almost every night with a stack of books and planners and articles. She would spread her papers out across the dining-room table and study them so intently that it was almost like she was back in law school. Tom would wander in, but as soon as he saw that Kay wasn’t working on a case, he would change directions and steer off toward the den. “There’s a program on about the Galápagos,” he’d say, trying to make it sound as if that was the reason he’d come in in the first place. “Does anybody else want to watch?”

  Kay always smiled and shook her head. A minute later the television came on and we heard the sound of blue-footed boobies splashing into the warm sea.

  “I can’t believe how much there is to think about,” Kay said. She tossed her pen down onto a copy of Martha Stewart’s Weddings and rubbed her eyes. “I have my first meeting with Mrs. Carlson, the wedding planner, tomorrow and I’m supposed to come in with some ideas, but I don’t even know where to start.” She twisted her engagement ring around on her finger, the eternal flame. “You and Dad were so lucky to be able to just elope.”

  Was this the opening I had been dreaming of? Was she subtly asking my permission? “Everyone is allowed to elope,” I said cautiously. “It’s a noble tradition.”

  Kay rolled her eyes as if I was suggesting she buy a bag of silk worms and start spinning the thread for her dress. My plan was too fraught with difficulties to even consider. “I could never do that to people.”

  “Do what? Do it to whom?”

  “Everyone would be so disappointed. Remember how disappointed Grandma was?”

  I waved my hand. “You’re only remembering half of the story. Ultimately she was very glad.”

  “Glad about what?” Taffy said, walking into the dining room and picking up a copy of Bridal Guide.

  “Mom and Dad eloping,” Kay said.

  Taffy’s face went ashen. She folded slowly into a chair. “Tell me y
ou’re not thinking about eloping. That was the worst thing that ever happened in our family when I was growing up.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Taffy. You were eighteen when I got married. What did you care?”

  “I was sixteen and I wanted to be your maid of honor. I thought you eloped just because you didn’t want me to be in your wedding.”

  I wondered if such a level of solipsism was possible, but I remembered my sister at eighteen and thought I would save myself the trouble of asking. “I wasn’t the maid of honor at your wedding,” I said. That was a prize that went to a plump girl with dark eyes named Lydia something or other who had been Taffy’s best friend for that particular six-month period.

  “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to ask you after you didn’t even invite me to your wedding.”

  “We didn’t have a wedding.”

  Taffy put her hand over Kay’s and squeezed. “This is why people should never elope,” she said.

  Kay gave me an insider’s smile and shook her head as if to say, I never even thought about it in the first place, then she reached into her briefcase and pulled out a book of fabric samples. “If we can go back to the issue at hand for a minute, Mrs. Bennett says I really need to start thinking about choosing my colors.”

  Taffy picked up the fabric and got serious. If she decided not to teach tap at the studio, then maybe we could give her Mrs. Carlson’s job and save some money, except that the idea of having Taffy around for that long was a little overwhelming.

  I kept myself on a slow boil for the rest of the evening while I nodded my head in all the right places and agreed with every dress Kay pointed to in the magazines. At half past nine the doorbell rang. Kay shot out of her chair like a jackrabbit, clutching at her watch. “What time is it?”

  “Expecting somebody?”

  She started madly shoving her books and magazines back into her briefcase. There was a flutter of photographs, white dresses and satin shoes flipping between wedding cakes and sunny shots of Tahiti. “I’ll get the door!”

  But Kay wasn’t having much luck with the door these days.

  “Jack Carroll.” We heard from the dining room.

  “I remember you, Jack,” Taffy said. “I remember all of Kay’s friends.”

  Kay hoisted up her briefcase under one arm and suddenly Jack was there to take it from her. He had shaken off whatever grimness had weighed on him before and had reverted to his easy, charming self. “You were going to meet me,” she said.

  “Half an hour ago I was going to meet you,” Jack said. I believe he had on exactly the same outfit he had worn the last time we saw him: the suit, the shirt, the tie—everything about Jack was wrinkled and familiar.

  “Well, we should get going. Jack was going to go over a case with me. We should get to work.” She patted her briefcase as if it were full of legal briefs.

  “I thought you said you were at the D.A.’s office,” Taffy said.

  “Cross-pollination,” Jack says. “It keeps us healthy.”

  “You should keep your voice down,” I said to Kay. “Your father’s in the other room.”

  Kay nodded and looked at the door. Jack checked out the room like someone who was hoping to find a plate of food. “Are you having a good visit?” he asked Taffy.

  “A great visit,” Kay said, and took the sleeve of his jacket firmly in one hand. “Let’s go.”

  Jack picked up a rogue copy of Bride’s and headed toward the door. “Good to see you both again,” he said.

  Taffy and I waved and said our good nights. Mercifully, Tom missed the whole party.

  “That one worries me a little,” Taffy said.

  She was right. Kay making plans with Jack was more than a little suspicious at this point, but in my book it was nowhere near as serious as what Taffy had done. “She might have eloped,” I said. “I could have talked her into it.”

  “Impossible,” Taffy said. “Any woman who’s bought that many bridal magazines has no intentions of eloping.”

  “She’s the one who brought it up!”

  Taffy shook her head. “And I always thought you were a better mother than I was. Don’t you get it? It was all a test. She wants to know if you’re really happy about this. You have to tell her that this wedding is important to you.”

  “It’s only important to me insofar as it’s going to destroy me.”

  “Look, Minnie, Kay is going to marry a Bennett, and it’s going to be the biggest send-off since poor, unfortunate Diana landed the prince. Do you think she’s going to cash that in for a trip to the courthouse where she works? You can’t deal with this wedding by trying to stop it.”

  “I’m not trying to stop it,” I said. “I just want her to know she has options.”

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  I folded my arms on the dining-room table and made a cradle for my head. “Did you really care that I eloped?”

  Taffy sat down next to me and for a split second she put her hand on my shoulder. “For about five minutes. You know how I hate to miss a party.”

  chapter ten

  WE LAID IT ALL OUT FOR ANNETTE, OUR ACCOUNTANT. We told her the truth. Usually when we came in to tell her the truth about something, she wrote down numbers or tapped things out on her calculator. She would have all of our files spread out across her desk and would sift through them while we explained things. But this time she just listened. She folded her hands on the desk, leaned forward, and let us talk. We didn’t have to give her the history. Annette had been doing our taxes and badgering us to save for our retirement since long before we could ever have imagined we would one day retire. She had been my student in ballet when she was in junior high, though she didn’t go all the way with it. Annette’s heart had always been in numbers. She had known Kay all her life, and while she didn’t know Trey Bennett, she, like every other citizen of Raleigh, knew just about everything about him. Annette was probably forty-five. She wasn’t inclined toward exercise and she smoked. I knew her well enough to nag her about it from time to time. After all, she was familiar with every detail of my checking account. She had seen me through my most private moments of being overdrawn. It was very important to me to think that Annette was always going to be there.

  Tom was nervous. Thinking about money always made him nervous, and thinking about the wedding made him a wreck. There was a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead and he was talking very fast. “We’re guessing at the money in the first place. We’ve called some people, people whose children had big weddings, blowouts, and then we doubled it. If they’re talking nine hundred guests—”

  “It could be a thousand,” I interjected. We might as well get it all out on the table.

  Tom swallowed. That particular number was chilling. “Could be. A thousand. So we’re guessing the total, and this is with the flowers and the band, I’m assuming a very fancy sit-down dinner for everyone, maybe seven hundred fifty thousand dollars? That’s what people are telling us. I can’t imagine that myself.”

  “My sister says it could go as high as a million.”

  “Her sister is from Atlanta,” Tom said, as if the exchange rates were different in Atlanta and you just had to figure everything there was going to be 25 percent more expensive. “I’m not asking for us to come up with five hundred thousand dollars. But the way I see it, we have to do something. We can’t ask to do nothing. To not contribute. That wouldn’t be right. Would that be right?” He turned to me and I shrugged.

  “What’s your best-case scenario?” Annette asked.

  “Best case?” Tom mulled this one over. “Excluding elopement, excluding her suddenly falling in love with a poor guy who wants a reception in the church basement, excluding the chance that they decide to invite blood relatives only, I guess the best case is that the thing costs seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and we find a way to come up with half. So, best case, you help us find three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Annette looked at Tom and looked at me. I thou
ght she was going to say something, but when she opened her mouth, an enormous laugh escaped. She looked as surprised by it as we were, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, but she was still laughing, her chest was convulsing. She couldn’t pull it together. Annette excused herself, went out into the hallway, and closed her door. Tom and I sat in our matching chairs on the other side of the desk and looked at each other. We could still hear Annette in the hall. Everything would be quiet for a second and then she would have another flare-up. It was as if she were trying to stamp down a bunch of small fires.

  “Well, I guess we have a better idea of where we stand now,” Tom said.

  Annette came back holding several Kleenex and sat down at her desk. “Wow, that was unprofessional. I mean, if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened in front of the two of you, but still.” She shook her head. “I mean, whew. It just came out of nowhere.”

  “Has it been happening a lot?” I asked.

  “Well, I have the impulse all the time. People come in here and they say the most insane things—’I’m just going to ask the IRS if I can take this year off,’ that kind of craziness. I used to feel really concerned for them, but now it all just seems hysterical to me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s hormonal.”

  “So what you’re telling us through your hysteria is that we aren’t going to be able to get three hundred seventy-five thousand from the bank,” Tom said.

  “I’m sure it’s there,” Annette said. “But you’ll have to go in with a ski mask and a gun to get it out, and that’s not what I ever recommend to my clients, especially my favorite clients.” Another little chortle escaped her but she got right on top of it.

  “Realistically, then,” I said.

  “Realistically.” She pulled over her little adding machine and a sheet of numbers. Annette’s fingers could really fly, and I thought that if she had learned how to do that with her feet in junior high, she would have been a star on Broadway. I liked the steady tap and then the mechanical expulsion of the paper. It always felt so promising, like the lottery numbers were coming down the chute. “Now, this is a ballpark, this is rounded. For something more exact I’m going to need a little time.”