by Jeanne Ray
THE SUN WAS just going down and we were lying there reveling in the silence of our house. “It was very nice of you to call,” Tom said.
“I’m glad you were free.” I wanted to go to sleep. It was an impossible time of day to take a nap and Taffy would be home from class soon. If you fall asleep once it’s dark, you really are done for. “You want to hear something really funny?”
“Tell me something funny.” Tom pulled me closer.
“I almost called Lila Bennett today to tell her we couldn’t pay for the wedding. I was going to do it as a surprise.”
“That’s incredibly sweet.” He gave me a lazy kiss on the part of my hair. “What stopped you?”
“She called me first. I was sitting right there, my hand was practically on the phone.”
“I hate it when that happens.”
“She wants to go over the colors next week with Mrs. Carlson, the wedding planner. She wants me to know she cares about my input on the colors.”
“Well, she won’t care once she finds out you’re broke. She’ll plan a lime-green wedding for our daughter and there won’t be anything you can do to stop her.”
Suddenly there was a flash of headlights through the bedroom window and Tom and I both sat bolt upright in bed.
“Get dressed,” Tom said, hopping into his pants.
I rolled over and grabbed for my underwear. “Can you see who it is?”
Tom glanced out of the window, somehow managing to zip up his pants and pull on his shirt in one fluid motion. “It’s too dark.”
I found a sweater on the floor and some loose jazz pants. We heard the front door swing open. This was not doorbell company.
“Mom? Dad?”
Tom raked his hand deftly through his hair and hit the hallway. “Hey there, we’re back here.”
“What are you guys doing back there? The house is so dark, I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“Your mother found another crack in the ceiling,” I heard him say. The secret to a good lie was to tell them something they would believe.
I had a minute now and I ran a brush through my hair and pinned it back up again. When I came into the kitchen, Kay was already pulling out a stack of papers from her bag. “Hi, honey.”
“Where’s Taffy?”
“She’s teaching a tap class.”
“Taffy can dance?”
“Turns out she’s great.”
Kay looked around the kitchen hopefully. “Have you guys eaten already?”
“I’ll call for pizza,” Tom said.
“Perfect, count me in. Just tell them to hold the olives. I hate olives.”
“I know you hate olives,” Tom said, going to look up the number. “Do you think I just got here?”
Kay put a cluster of fabric swatches and paint cards out on the table. Most of them were in the family of either ashy blue or pale moss green. Impeccably tasteful. “Mrs. Bennett wanted me to show you the colors. She’s afraid you’re going to feel excluded. And Dad, I want to go over this deposition I have for tomorrow. I don’t think the arrest looks clean at all.”
chapter eleven
A WHOLE WEEK HAD GONE BY AND NEDDY HADN’T called. I had thought that all of his previous irritating phone calls for how to get the garage door opener to work (change the batteries) or how he could get his groceries delivered to the house (Taffy called their housekeeper and made arrangements for her to do the shopping) would have been depressing for Taffy, but the silence proved to be infinitely worse. Around seven o’clock, the time the phone used to ring, she would sit in the kitchen drinking a glass of wine and dabbing her eyes on her sleeve while she pretended to look at a magazine. Every night without a call seemed to drive the reality of her new life closer to home.
“I called him about sending me my mail and he didn’t even pick up the phone,” Taffy said. “Maybe I should just give in.”
“Give in on what?” Tom asked.
“I should give him my divorce lawyer. That’s why he’s giving me the cold shoulder. He’s sulking. When he sulks long enough, I always give him his own way.”
“Why does he want your divorce lawyer?”
“Because whoever gets Buddy Lewis always winds up winning in the end.”
Tom squatted down in front of Taffy and put his hands on her knees. “Listen to me, as a brother-in-law and a lawyer: You want to win. Good for you for calling this guy first.”
“How do I know why he isn’t calling? Maybe it has nothing to do with Buddy. Neddy could be lying dead on the floor, and who would know it?”
“Taffy, he isn’t dead,” I said.
“Let me dream,” she said, and slammed her magazine closed.
On a brighter note, she was a huge hit at the dance studio, so much so that I might have felt a little threatened by it if I didn’t feel so sorry for her. Taffy was a tougher teacher than I was. She did not tolerate whispering or horsing around of any fashion. Nor did she tolerate sloppy stepping. If someone didn’t know the steps, there was no shame in that, she would say, but we weren’t here to simply fake it and move on to the next routine. Taffy, who hadn’t had a real job since she gave tennis lessons at the country club the summer before she got married, liked professionalism. She liked order. While I thought her standards might be a bit too rigorous for little girls, they all seemed to love it. Whenever I taught one of Taffy’s classes, I noticed that we started exactly on time, forgoing the normal ten minutes of questions and giggling, the rows at the barre were straighter, and everyone kept her shoulders back. In short, Taffy had brought some good old Marine sensibility to McSwan’s, although I can’t imagine where she had picked it up to begin with.
“That’s the way I am with Neddy,” she said. “I guess it just came to me over the years. He’s such a big slob, you know, a great big self-indulgent kid. If I didn’t take a hard line with Neddy, he’d sit home and eat M&M’s all day. He used to call me the General, but he liked it. He’d say, ‘General, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be able to find my toes.’ I never knew if that meant he’d forget where he’d put them or he’d just get too fat to see them.” Taffy looked at her wedding ring. She twisted it around a couple of times on her finger. She had an engagement ring that we all thought was the biggest thing we’d ever seen until we saw Kay’s. “Isn’t that odd, the way I said he liked me bossing him around? Maybe he didn’t like it at all. Maybe that’s why he left me.”
IT WAS A combination of unbearable darkness and unbearable light around the McSwain house, and I had no idea which one I found more perplexing: Taffy’s heartbreak over the loss of Neddy and his phone calls or Kay’s constant euphoria in trying to draw up a list of bridesmaids. The emotional barometer of our house shot up and down at any given hour. The two people who seemed to deal with it best were Kay and Taffy, who were each endlessly considerate of the other’s feelings.
“I think that calla lilies would be perfect for the bridesmaids’ bouquets,” Taffy would say.
“Have you talked to Neddy anymore?” Kay would ask.
It was in this sea of uncertainty that I decided to throw Taffy a surprise party for what she claimed to be her fifty-eighth and I knew to be her sixtieth birthday. There would be no people hiding in the closets with sparklers, no flashing a camera the minute the lights went on. It would just be a nicer-than-usual dinner at which everyone was present. I didn’t want to tell Taffy about it only because I knew she was in no mood to celebrate anything, much less herself, but I wanted to at least take a stab at cheering her up.
Four nights later I asked Taffy to teach both the afternoon and the evening classes, and I made a rack of lamb with rosemary new potatoes and asparagus with blueberries. I felt as though I hadn’t cooked in years, and I took some satisfaction in the salad and the smooth icing on the lemon cake. I’d bought Taffy a very fancy pair of black tap shoes with a two-inch heel and wrapped them up in a box with gold ribbon. I always tapped in flats, but I knew Taffy would like the heel. The house was as clean as the house c
ould get under the present circumstances, and I’d cleared all of Kay’s wedding paraphernalia off the dining-room table and put out some African daisies I’d bought at the grocery store for a centerpiece. I lit the candles and took a long look at the picture: It was as close to Martha Stewart Living as I was ever going to get. Taffy was the first to arrive and she seemed happy and grateful, either that I had remembered her birthday or that she now had the time to grab a quick shower and change out of her dance clothes before the guests arrived.
The guest list in its original form was what anyone would have suspected: Tom and me, Trey and Kay, George, Woodrow, and Taffy. I invited Woodrow because he was one of the only people in town who Taffy knew, and besides, I had an ulterior motive: He hadn’t been over all week and I thought by inviting him to the party he would come to realize how much he missed us. Then, in a move of superior good manners, I called Trey and invited him myself. Sure, we weren’t a fancy bunch, but if he was going to be a member of the family, he might as well start coming to the birthday parties now.
Surprises listed in ascending order.
SURPRISE #1: Woodrow arrives in a sport coat and blue bow tie.
A small point but one definitely worth mentioning. Woodrow had been at my house on and off for three months, and I had never seen him wearing anything but a thermal underwear top and a pair of paint-splattered overalls. The colors changed but the look was always the same. He usually had some drywall in his hair by the end of the day and, without realizing it, that was how I had come to think of him, as a man with drywall in his hair. But when the doorbell rang, there stood Woodrow wearing a sport coat and a blue bow tie, looking not at all like the man who spent so much time crawling around under my house. Not enough men wear bow ties, if you ask me. Tom always said the jury would never take him seriously in one. But I can tell you they certainly would have taken Woodrow seriously. He came with a very nice bottle of French white wine and a wrapped box for Taffy.
SURPRISE #2: Another member of the Woodrow family arrives.
“Mom,” George said as he walked in the back door. “I invited Erica to come to dinner tonight. I hope that’s okay.”
I turned around and there stood the radiant Erica with her high heels and bare legs and her hair pulled back into the same tight bun she wore to do construction work. She held herself like a young woman who had danced ballet every day of her life. There is nothing more enticing than good posture. I was extremely glad to see her and calculated another place at the table. “Of course it’s okay. Erica, I’m delighted that you’re here.” As I kissed her cheek, I tried to remember the last time I’d seen George. It had been days. Many days. With his study sessions and peculiar student hours, I often didn’t see him for long stretches of time, but now there was a light going on in my head.
“You told me your mother invited me to dinner,” Erica said to George.
“I had every intention of inviting you,” I said.
“Don’t cover for him,” Erica said kindly. I could tell she wanted to kick George in the shins.
“Erica?” Woodrow said, walking into the kitchen to fix himself a drink.
“Daddy?”
“Woodrow’s here!” George said. “That’s terrific! Erica, your dad’s here.”
“I can see my dad’s here.” Erica pulled her blue shawl higher up on her shoulders.
“It’s my sister’s birthday,” I said, trying to explain it to Erica, trying to make her feel as though she hadn’t been ambushed. “You remember my sister, Taffy?”
“It’s a birthday party?” Erica said. She closed her eyes.
SURPRISE #3: Kay has two dates.
Enter my beautiful girl, already on the course of bridal radiance. There was a time not so long ago that Kay would have come over wearing jeans and a Duke Law sweatshirt, with a licorice whip hanging out of her mouth. But those days were gone. Always she wears lipstick now, always her blunt cut looks freshly shorn, as if she stopped by the hairdresser’s on her way to work every morning. I wondered if she’d started having facials or if it was just the glow that came with making lists of all the things you wanted.
“Where’s Trey?” I said.
Kay shrugged sweetly and whispered in my ear, “I told Jack he could come. He’s been driving me crazy lately. We’re kind of working through this whole separation thing. He says he wants to still be able to spend time with my family.”
“Hey, Mrs. McSwain!” Jack swung into the room and kissed my cheek. I have already made note of his looks and there is no need to go over it again. This guy had one outfit or he had many outfits all crushed to look like the same outfit. He managed to keep an extremely consistent layer of stubble on his cheek. He managed to look like the sexy rogue in a beer ad.
“Jack, hello! Kay, sweetheart, I’m going to need you in the kitchen for one minute.”
Off we went through the swinging kitchen door, which was closed to give the dining room the dressier look it never achieves. I took her shoulders in my hands. “What in the hell are you doing with Jack?” I knew this was not the place I should be starting. We had a lot of ground to cover in a very short period of time.
“Jack is a friend of mine, you know that.” Kay was using her lawyer tone on me and it did not work.
“We’re meeting with wedding planners, we’re talking about colors, we’re spending every evening poring over dresses, and you’re showing up at your aunt’s birthday party with your old boyfriend?”
“He’s a friend, Mother. There is nothing going on between Jack and me. You know I love Trey.”
“That’s great. Tell him that when he gets here for dinner.”
Kay blinked and then she cocked her head to one side. It was a look Stamp sometimes gave me when he was trying to figure out what in the hell I was talking about. “Trey’s not coming to dinner,” she said calmly.
“I invited him. I called him.”
Now her eyes were open wide. “How could you! How could you do that to me?”
“I was being polite. I thought surely you’d told him. I told you to invite him. I was just—”
Doorbell.
Kay grabbed me. “I’ll get the door, you tell Jack.”
There was no discussion this time. She was out of there as fast as a wire-haired fox terrier with a mouth full of liverwurst. I slipped through the door in one of its mad crashes back and forth, the wake of Kay’s panic. “Jack? Could I see you in the kitchen for just one minute?”
Jack ambled in, a beer in his hand, Irish charm and Irish trouble written all over him. “Can I help with dinner?”
“Can you help with dinner,” I said, thinking about it. “Yes, really, you can. There isn’t a lot of time, so I’ll get right to the point. Kay invited you to dinner and I invited Trey, so you’re going to have to go out there and make yourself look very much like the friend of the family that you keep telling everybody you are.”
Jack was taking it in. There was no great look of glee on his face. Then Taffy swung through the door with her empty glass.
“He’s here again,” she said to me, looking at Jack.
“There’s been a little mix-up,” he said sadly.
“I should say so. I was just talking to the future bridegroom in the living room.”
“I should go,” Jack said.
He was something, that one. I could see why Kay would have a hard time shaking him off. He looked so utterly defeated that I wanted to put my arms around him. He was charming when he was happy, but he was irresistible when he was sad.
“Don’t do it,” Taffy said. She was in a bright mood, wearing a set of gold silk hostess pajamas with a long strand of pearls that no one in their right mind would have packed for a visit to Raleigh, but she looked fantastic. In spite of all the things that had changed, she was still my little sister, a girl who loved parties and loved them best when they were for her. “We’ll just say you’re my date.” She put her hand on his arm. “Taffy was always crazy about Kay’s friend Jack. They hit it off so well t
ogether.”
“He wouldn’t dream of missing her birthday party,” Jack said, gratefully putting his hand over hers.
“She wouldn’t even have a party without him.”
“You know I owe you for this,” Jack said.
“Maybe we’ll owe each other. It’s still your responsibility to cheer me up.”
And off they went to the party. I went into the cupboards and took out another place setting. If the doorbell didn’t ring again, I could avoid putting another leaf in the table.
SURPRISE #4: The doorbell rings again.
Despite all the reconfiguration, everyone seemed to be having a very good time. Erica was talking to Trey about the hospital where she was doing her student nursing, which happened to be a hospital his parents owned, and they both agreed it was an excellent facility. Taffy was talking to Woodrow about where he had been and how Stamp seemed to be having a relapse in his absence. George was rhapsodizing to Jack about the fabulousness that was Erica. Kay was talking to her father about a case, but mostly she was sneaking off glances at Trey and then Jack, and I thought maybe it was good for her to have them both in the same room, where she could do some serious competitive evaluations and make up her mind once and for all. I was serving my cheese puffs, which had turned out magnificently. Everyone was milling about and drinking and paying Taffy lavish compliments, which was what people really wanted for their birthday.