Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “Just tell us,” Tom said.

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  We looked at her. Ten thousand dollars? “That would cover the rice they throw as the couple is getting into the car.” Assuming they planned on using some sort of pearl-grain rice hand-grown by Tibetan monks.

  “That’s all we’ve got?” Tom said.

  “Oh, no,” Annette said. “You don’t even have that. You had the fund for the Florida room and the fund for the retirement trip to Italy, but we’re assuming that both of those things are going into the foundation of your house at the moment. Then you’re going to need to pay off the addition, unless you decide to scrap it, which may cost you almost as much as finishing it at this point. You’ve got a little money for your share of George’s law school and you’re not throwing that away on a wedding. So the ten thousand is going to be another home equity loan. The only other place it could come from would be your retirement account, and that’s not happening.”

  “But it could,” Tom said.

  “No, it could not,” Annette said. She leaned back in her chair and looked at us with a great deal of compassion. She had two girls who were teenagers now. She knew that sooner or later this would be happening to her, too. “Listen, the rich aren’t like you and me. They forget things, like the fact that everybody else isn’t rich. Sometimes they even forget that they have an enormous amount of money themselves. So they asked you to pay for half of this thing and you can’t. Just own up to it. I know it’s humiliating, but it’s a fact. The numbers don’t lie. You can’t pay for the kind of wedding they’re talking about. What you have to remember is that ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, and there are a whole lot of people out there who would fall over dead from a heart attack if you said you could spend ten thousand on your daughter’s wedding. You’ve got to keep it in perspective.”

  She gave us each a peppermint from the bowl she kept on the desk and she sent us on our way.

  When we left we were broken, defeated. We sat in the parking lot behind her office in the cold car, but Tom didn’t make a move to turn it on.

  “If I had stayed corporate …” Tom started.

  He did this every now and then. I will admit that a couple of times over the years I had done it myself but always silently. It was the kind of game that was best not to play. “You would be a full partner, your name on the stationery. You would be making a fortune and you would be miserable, so none of it would be worthwhile.” I reached out and squeezed his hand. “You can’t call your whole life into question just because we can’t pay for Kay to have a wedding with nine hundred people she doesn’t even know. Those are not the standards by which we’re going to judge ourselves. I refuse to.”

  Tom looked at me. His eyes were tired behind his glasses and his skin was pale. When did we get to be so old? “I could have done everything another way. There was a fork in the road and I went left. For a long time I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “You did the right thing, and anyway, you can’t go back to that fork. It isn’t an option to change everything now.”

  “I wanted to be in the courtroom. I wanted to defend people. What was the point of being a lawyer if you couldn’t defend people? It was the only thing that made sense to me.”

  “So you did the right thing.”

  Tom’s voice was worn out, defeated. He was looking back on all the nights he’d slept on the couch in his office getting ready to go to trial, all the peanut-butter crackers he’d eaten from the vending machine. “But they weren’t the people I thought they’d be. I mean, some of them were, a few of them, but there were a lot of bad people over the years, people who didn’t care about anything, people who were guilty. I feel like I gave up making a good life for my family so I could defend people who were guilty.”

  “Listen, you’ve got to stop this. This is a wedding. This is about cages of white doves and a five-thousand-dollar cake and a whole bunch of valet parkers who are all dressed alike. You’re talking about regretting a whole life devoted to the most fundamentally important things you believe in. You can’t regret that just because we can’t pay for this wedding.”

  Tom was quiet for a while. Even when one of us was really worked up about something, we still managed to listen to the other one. I liked to think it was the thing that had made this marriage possible. “I can regret it for a little while,” he said mildly.

  I leaned across the space between our seats and put my head on his shoulder. Oh, how I longed for the days of bench seats in cars. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t stop you.”

  I DROPPED TOM off at the office and went home to get ready for class. Maybe now we understood absolutely that we couldn’t pay for half of the wedding, but we were no closer to understanding how we were going to break the news to the Bennetts or, worse yet, to Kay. As I was walking in the house, I had the sinking feeling that nothing had really changed at all, except that Tom had been given the opportunity to beat himself up over not making more money. When I came into the kitchen, Taffy was talking on the phone and Stamp was standing on the kitchen table licking a clean butter dish, which I believe had had a half stick of butter on it when I left the house this morning.

  “Stamp!” I said. “You get down from there right now!”

  Stamp looked up at me, wagged his missing tail, and went back to work on the dish. Taffy gave me a hard stare and put her hand over the receiver. “I’m on the phone,” she said.

  “Well, the dog certainly seems to understand that.” I went to pick Stamp up, but he looked at me and growled. I was furious. The audacity of that dog, after I had given him a roof over his head, and the time of my busy contractor for what seemed to be his unsuccessful lessons, and the calf of my husband, who had enough to worry about without being bitten by a dog, a dog who was never invited to visit in the first place!

  “So why did you decide that you had to call him now, anyway?” Taffy said into the phone.

  “Don’t you dare growl at me!” I picked him up and dropped him unceremoniously onto the floor, at which point he immediately hopped back up on a chair on his way to the table. I lifted my hand. “Ah!” I said loudly, mimicking Woodrow. Stamp stopped and thought about it for a minute. He knew the butter was gone as well as I did. He got off the chair, went under the table, and lay down.

  “Would you stop talking to the dog!” Taffy shouted.

  I looked at my sister, whose face, I had failed to notice before, was red, her eyes watery. She turned away from me and bent over the receiver. “It was every bit as much my right to call him as it was yours.… Well then, I’m just the one who thought of it first.”

  I went over and stood beside her. I put my hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. “So you’ll find somebody else. You seem so good at finding somebody else. When you do, have him call Buddy Lewis.… No, I’m not going to talk about this.… You can’t have your way every time, Neddy. That’s not the way it works. You don’t get to have everything just because you want it.… Yes. Yes, I understand. All right, then.” Taffy hung up the phone. She looked at me. She seemed almost frantic.

  “What happened?” I said quietly.

  “Goddamn Neddy. He called Buddy Lewis. He finally got around to calling the divorce lawyer, and when he found out that Buddy was representing me, he just went ballistic. He said I’ve got to give him back Buddy Lewis. Is that the most insane thing you’ve ever heard?”

  “Why do you have to give him back?”

  “Neddy says they’re friends. He says they play golf together and Buddy doesn’t want to represent me. He says I never even would have thought about calling Buddy Lewis if it wasn’t for him, that I wouldn’t even have known his name, which isn’t true because all of my friends who got divorced used Buddy Lewis. Anybody who’s ever been unhappy in their marriage and lives in Atlanta knows who Buddy Lewis is.”

  “So you told him no?”

  Taffy rested her forehead against her hands and she cried and cried. I
t was the grief of a child who cried from a fever, a girl who cried out of the frustration of her age, a young woman who had lost her young husband to war. Taffy cried and Stamp came from under the table and jumped up on her lap. Taffy held him to her face and cried into his neck while I stroked her hair. “He’s going to divorce me,” she said. “He’s really going to divorce me.”

  There was nobody else at home. George was in school and Woodrow and his group were off somewhere adding on a master bedroom that they were already late in starting because they’d spent too much time over here. We were all alone, me and Taffy and Stamp. I stroked my sister’s hair. Every now and then Stamp would look up at me and lick my wrist.

  Taffy pulled it together but it took a while. I made us some coffee and we sat and drank it.

  “I guess I thought he wouldn’t go through with it,” Taffy said. “The way he’s been calling all the time and he never mentioned anything. I guess I’d let myself think that I was just on vacation, that we were working things out and that I would go home and, I don’t know, that we’d forget about it.”

  “That would be a lot to forget,” I said.

  Taffy nodded. “But I could have.” She took each of Stamp’s ears between her fingers and rubbed the thin leather of skin. The light shone through them when she held them up and turned them pink. “About that job …”

  “You can have a job.”

  “I should do that. Minnie, I know you must hate me. I’m sorry that I’m staying for so long.”

  “I don’t hate you at all. You can stay for as long as you want.”

  “It might be a while. At least this way I can be a little helpful. I think Woodrow was right. I’m going to go crazy if I just sit around here all day and do nothing.”

  “Maybe you can tap your way through this,” I said, trying to be a little lighthearted. “That’s the way I’ve gotten through everything awful in my life.”

  Taffy looked up and gave me a sad half-smile. “What’s ever been so awful in your life?”

  I had to think about it. There had been a miscarriage between Charlie and Kay. There had been the time when things were bad with Tom. There had been worries over money, always there had been worries over money, but I could see that compared to Taffy, coming out of a marriage that hadn’t been so good to begin with, my life had been blessed. I wasn’t an especially religious person, but that was the only word I could come up with. She had been beautiful and rich and I had been blessed. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing has been so awful.”

  She took a drink of her coffee and nodded like she had won the argument. “So, how did things go at the accountant’s?”

  “Well, maybe I should change my answer. The trip to the accountant’s was pretty awful.” I looked at my watch. Somehow we had fallen into the black hole of time. “I need to get going. I have a tap class at three.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Give yourself a break,” I said. “You’ve had a horrible day.”

  “So have you. I want to get to work.”

  “So get to work tomorrow.”

  Taffy shook her head. “Let’s go ahead and settle this thing once and for all. I’ve been looking over the schedule. I want the Intro to Tap, Beginning Tap, and Beginning Ballet.”

  “You took ballet, too?”

  “Ten years.”

  “If your marriage hadn’t broken up, I never would have known a thing about you.”

  “I’m going to take a shower. You don’t have to come to the school with me. I’m going to be fine. Stay home and balance your checkbook, or why don’t you take the quiet time to call Lila Bennett? Tell her that you’ve been thinking it over, and not only are you not going to pay for the wedding, you think they should pay you for the right to have Kay in the family.”

  “How much?”

  Taffy thought about it. For a minute she got the same look on her face as Annette had, as if she were running up a column of numbers in her head. “Half a million.”

  “For Kay?”

  “Oh, she’s worth it. I think you could get even more than that.”

  TAFFY LEFT FOR school and a little after that George called and said that he was going to be in his study group until midnight. He said that he hadn’t been called on yet in his Torts class and he was having a dark premonition that tomorrow was his day. I took Stamp for a walk and then I came home and sat down in front of the phone. It was a harmless little chunk of plastic and wires. I used it almost every day. I would pick it up now and call Lila Bennett. I wouldn’t talk it over with Tom first. That would be my gift to him. He would come home and I would say, Guess what I did today?

  My hands were sweating. I got up and poured myself a glass of wine. I sat down again to call, but Stamp was looking at me and I thought it didn’t really seem fair that I was getting a treat and he wasn’t. I had some liverwurst in the refrigerator.

  “Liverwurst?” I said.

  The dog shot straight up in the air. Suddenly the floor was a trampoline. Every time he hit it, he sprung back higher. “Liverwurst?” I said. “Liverwurst?”

  It was a word he knew. A word that meant more to him than sit or come or stay. He was jumping as high as the table, and I said the word over and over while I rifled through the refrigerator for the plastic Baggie of braunschweiger. I was laughing hysterically. I loathed Stamp, but sometimes even I had to admit that there had never been a more entertaining dog. I took a big gulp of wine and sang out our new favorite word. “Li-ver-wurst, liverwurst, liverwurst, Li-ver-wurst!” I was laughing and Stamp was barking hysterically and then the phone rang.

  “Hell-o-o,” I said to the tune of “Liverwurst.”

  “Caroline?” the voice said.

  “Speaking.” Stamp could do a back flip in the air if Woodrow set his mind to teach him. I was sure of it.

  “It’s Lila Bennett.”

  At that moment the nearly full tube of liverwurst slipped from my fingers. Stamp caught it in midair and was gone, gone, gone.

  “Hello,” I said, wishing there was a cordless phone in the kitchen so I could run after the dog before he killed himself, wishing I had never answered the phone in the first place, wishing I were dead.

  “How wonderful that I caught you in. I’m sitting here with Mrs. Carlson. The wedding planner? Did Kay tell you? We had such a productive meeting. We have several colors to go with, depending on the time of year. Caroline, I have got to be able to count on you for help. We need to get a date set and it simply cannot be six months from now. What’s that? Hold the line for one minute, will you?”

  “Yes, of course.” I clamped my hand over the receiver and called for the dog, but I may as well have been calling for Paul Newman to show up and refill my glass. I polished off the wine.

  “Mrs. Carlson was just agreeing with me. With these kinds of numbers, it isn’t going to be possible to do this in less than a year. Not possible.”

  “I understand.” The cord was long enough to get me back to the refrigerator.

  “Brilliant! Then we’re all on the same page. I’ll need you to meet with me and Mrs. Carlson very soon.”

  “I have something I need to talk to you about,” I said weakly. I pulled out the cork with one hand.

  “Is next week all right? We can talk about everything. Don’t think these colors are set in stone. Anything Kay shows you is just a suggestion. We want your input on this one hundred percent.”

  “About the wedding …”

  “Exactly. I don’t have my book in front of me. My secretary can call you. Is that all right? I don’t want to give you a date I can’t keep.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Perfect,” she said. “Thank you. Tell me, don’t you think this is all a dream?”

  When I found Stamp it was already too late. The bedroom looked like a crime scene. A dog can eat his own weight in liverwurst in under a minute. He was stretched out on Tom’s pillow, bits of heavy processed meat still clinging to the hairs of his muzzle. The used package lay spent
about six inches from his back paw. It was only plastic. It didn’t stand a chance. When I sat down on the bed, he never looked up. In one afternoon the dog had consumed half a stick of butter and probably eight ounces of liverwurst. I considered calling the vet to see if I needed to have his stomach pumped, but probably he just needed to sleep it off. The hairless skin of his belly seemed to strain as he breathed. I wondered if it ever happened that dogs simply exploded.

  I reached over and picked up the phone and dialed Tom’s office. “I’m in bed with Stamp,” I said.

  “I should have known it would turn out like this. What is the dog wearing?”

  “Liverwurst.” At the mention of the word, Stamp opened one eye and did a slow, meaningful thump with his tail stub.

  “Sounds sexy,” Tom said.

  “You want to hear something even sexier than that?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m home alone.” It was the first time it had happened since the night Kay called to tell us she was getting married.

  “How do you define alone?”

  “No other higher mammals in the house. Woodrow hasn’t come over at all today, George has a study group, and Taffy is teaching until seven. It’s just me and Stamp.”

  “Put the dog outside,” Tom said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Tom and I had been married for forty-two years. We had four children. I’m not saying we had sex all the time. Certainly weeks had gone by before. Over the course of so many years there had been times that months had gone by. But when we couldn’t make love, when the house was too full and we were too overwhelmed by the world around us, we were both keenly aware of the lack of opportunity. We leaned into each other while brushing our teeth in the morning, we touched feet while drinking coffee. Sometimes we wanted the sex, but other times we just wanted the privacy that sex represented. We wanted to feel profoundly together and alone in a way that comes most easily when two people are in bed. I picked Stamp up, carried his bloated body into Taffy’s room, and closed the door. Usually he was a dog who wanted to be with people, but I think, given the circumstances, he could have cared less. I took a two-minute shower to get the smell of terrier and liverwurst off of me and then I wrapped myself up in Tom’s bathrobe. I had just dried my feet when I heard his car pull up in the driveway, and I was down the hall as he opened the door. We stood there and kissed for a long time, a fulfillment of the promises made in all the little kisses we had exchanged over the last couple of weeks, then we went back to the bedroom and locked the door. We were used to locking the door. It never hurt to be safe.