Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  Taffy got her purse. “So then, the soup is ready anytime you want it. Just don’t let it boil.”

  Woodrow looked into the pot. “You made this?”

  “She cooks,” Tom said.

  “Good night,” Taffy said, clearly in a hurry to leave.

  Once they were gone, Tom put his arms around my waist and kissed me. “So, George is gone.”

  “Correct.”

  “And there goes Taffy.”

  “Correct again.”

  “And we don’t have to worry about dinner.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Maybe they forgot something,” I said hopefully.

  “You’re dreaming.”

  It was Trey. He was bearing no flowers and his tie was off. “I’m so sorry for just showing up this way,” he said. “I didn’t even really know I was coming here. I was just driving around. You’re getting ready to have dinner.”

  “We’re having soup,” Tom said. “Have some soup.”

  I was waiting for the polite refusal, but Trey pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. I doled out three bowls of soup while Tom got the silverware and the wine.

  “It’s gotten warm so quickly,” Trey said. I wondered if that was what he had come to tell us. He didn’t exactly seem dejected, but he seemed like he would be dejected if he were the kind of person to show his feelings.

  “It’ll do that,” Tom said.

  “Have you talked to Kay lately?”

  “I talked to her today,” I said. I had, but I had stopped asking her any questions. We just kept checking in with each other. She was trying to decide what to do. I knew that when she was ready to talk she would tell me so.

  “Did she seem okay to you?”

  “I think she’s feeling better.”

  Trey ate a spoonful of soup and then put the spoon back in the bowl. “I’m afraid that Kay is going to call off the engagement.”

  I put down my spoon as well. Tom filled Trey’s wineglass.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The way she’s been since Jack left with her cousin. I think maybe she didn’t realize she was in love with him until he was gone. I think he was the one she wanted to marry.”

  “Kay doesn’t want to marry Jack,” Tom said.

  I was a little surprised that he answered, especially that he answered the way he did. Tom usually left everything in the emotional realm to me.

  Trey, momentarily comforted, ate some more soup. “What makes you say that?”

  “She doesn’t love him. She loves you. Jack was a smooth talker, a real D.A. Maybe she got confused by all the flash, but trust me, if you’ve got the patience to hang on a little longer, Kay’s going to come out of her fog.”

  I was floored. Where had Tom gotten this? He said it with such authority that even I wondered if it was true.

  “Do you really think so?” Trey asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Mrs. McSwain, Caroline, do you think he’s right?”

  Tom looked at me, told me with complete visual accuracy what my answer should be. I had to trust him on this one. “I’m sure of it.”

  Trey put his head in his hands and for a minute I thought he was going to start weeping.

  “The question is, Can you wait for her to see it for herself?” Tom said.

  Trey looked up, first at Tom and then at me. “Of course I can wait. What choice do I have? I’m in love with her.”

  Trey finished his soup, thanked us profusely, and sought our forgiveness for interrupting our dinner, though we reassured him that he had done no such thing. I wasn’t sure of anything, but I thought he was leaving our house a happier man.

  “What in the world was that about?” I asked Tom.

  “He’s a smart guy,” Tom said. “He figured things out.”

  “I don’t mean with him, I mean with you. Why did you tell him that?”

  “In the business we call it buying your client some time.”

  “You were buying Kay time?”

  “Exactly.” Tom refilled our wineglasses.

  I absolutely couldn’t believe it. It was one thing to think that Tom could snow a judge and jury. It would be easy to snow Trey. But how had he snowed me, too? “So you just made it up? You don’t think Kay loves him?”

  “To tell you the truth,” my husband said to me, “I think she does.”

  AT MIDNIGHT I heard Taffy’s soft steps going down the hall to her room. At two o’clock I heard George come in. Both times I woke up only for a second, but after I knew that both of them were back, I slept better. All the chickens home to roost.

  TAFFY HAD DINNER with Woodrow again on Thursday that week and on Saturday they went to a jazz concert in Durham. “It’s good to get out,” she said. “It takes my mind off my problems.” She still hadn’t been able to track down Neddy or Holden, though not from want of trying.

  “And that’s it?”

  “I know the rule of thumb in this house is to fall madly in love by the second course of dinner, but that’s not my style. I like Woodrow. We have a good time together. I think for three dates that’s pretty good.”

  “Don’t you want to tell me anything about it?”

  “Not really,” Taffy said, but then she thought about it for a minute. “Okay, I’ll tell you this: I get a kick out of the way everybody looks at us, the way the black people and the white people look at us. Not like they’re especially scandalized or anything, but they notice, and I think of myself, how if I had seen a couple our age coming into the restaurant, one white and one black, I would have noticed it, too. You see two white people sitting down to dinner, two black people, who cares? But this is different. And I know they’re thinking we must have been married for forty years, and that we were probably some big civil-rights trailblazers or something.”

  “Did you mention it to Woodrow?”

  She shook her head. “That’s the other thing I like. It doesn’t phase him one bit. It’s like, whatever bad feelings are out there in the world, he’s already seen them and he’s over it.”

  The good news for us was that Woodrow was back working in the basement, and some days he brought enough of a crew to work on the basement and the Florida room. For the first time it seemed possible to me that we would soon be lifted from the yoke of construction.

  Kay and Trey seemed to be coming along, too. Nobody mentioned the wedding, I hadn’t heard a word from Mrs. Carlson, but they stopped by a couple of times on their way to someplace else. Kay was looking more like her old self, which is to say happy, no mascara, no fabric samples.

  In short, the world was coming along nicely. Classes at the studio were full and Taffy was very much in demand. George balanced his time between law school and Erica. Tom was busy at work. Stamp had learned to play dead. I would have been happy to freeze things just the way they were, but when do things ever stay the way you want them to?

  The telegram came.

  This in itself was an amazing thing to me. I had no idea that there still was such a thing as a telegram. With easy overseas calls and faxes and e-mail, I couldn’t even imagine a person wanting to send a telegram, unless, of course, that person didn’t want to be reached and didn’t want to talk to you.

  At any given hour at our house it was possible to be alone and then five minutes later have half a dozen people sitting in the living room. When this particular telegram came (the first and probably last to ever make it to our door), Taffy and I had just come home from school and Tom was already home from work. George was getting ready to go pick up Erica, and Kay and Trey had stopped by on a long hot run they were taking after work. Both of them wore bright blue shorts and orange reflector vests, and with their cheeks flushed from the exercise, they had never looked so completely a pair.

  “It’s for you,” I said to Taffy.

  Maybe it was all those war movies, but I couldn’t imagine a telegram having anything in it but bad news. My first thought was that Neddy was dead. That the junior executi
ve whose name I could no longer remember was wiring to say he had drowned in a scuba lesson off the coast of Fiji. When Taffy opened the envelope, she fell into a chair before she could have gotten to the end of the page. But the message was short. The whole thing was a very quick read.

  JOYFUL TIDINGS STOP JACK AND I MARRIED TODAY IN CAP FERRET STOP IMPETUOUS BUT EXACTLY CORRECT STOP WILL CALL FROM THE HONEYMOON STOP WE ARE VERY VERY HAPPY STOP LOVE HOLDEN.

  “Read it out loud,” Taffy said. And so I did.

  The room was very quiet. There had been a lot of emotion these past couple of months, and now I waited for it to come. I waited for Kay to break down. Maybe Trey was waiting for the same thing. We each looked one to the other, no one wanting to be the one to say something first.

  “Well,” George said finally. “There’s a big surprise.”

  Then Kay smiled and she looped her arm through Trey’s. “Good for them,” she said. “May it last forever.”

  At that point I started to cry and I think Trey was getting a little misty, but it was Taffy who completely broke down.

  “What was she thinking of!” Taffy said. “I have one child and I don’t even get to see her married? What did I do to her that was so awful?”

  Kay went to her aunt and pulled up a chair beside her and Taffy fell into her arms and cried great, heartbroken sobs.

  IT WAS HOLDEN’S wedding, thousands of miles away in the South of France, that tipped the scales. For Kay, it tipped them to certainty: With Jack married off she finally found the conviction in her heart for Trey.

  “As soon as you read that telegram, I felt this enormous sense of relief,” she said to me the next day over lunch. “It was like I’d been keeping my foot in the door all this time, and as soon as that door was closed, I knew it was the right thing.”

  “You’re not settling?”

  “Settling for Trey? How would that even be possible? I look back on that whole thing with Jack and I don’t even know what I was thinking of. I meant what I said, I hope they’re happy. Maybe two giant egos are like a double negative, they just cancel each other out. I think Holden and Jack were probably made for each other. I think it was my role to find a way for them to meet.”

  “So the wedding’s on?”

  “Absolutely, but now I think it’s going to be easier. I’m not going to get taken over by Mrs. Carlson. Trey and I will talk it over.”

  I knew that meant sooner or later we would have to talk about the money, but I’d done such a good job putting it off that I didn’t see why I couldn’t keep going a little longer.

  If Holden’s wedding had made Kay realize her own happiness, it threw Taffy into the pit of despair. I could see how much she had pulled herself up since she first came to Raleigh, because now she was back where she had started from. All of her efforts came unraveled. In her mind, her husband was gone and her daughter was gone. In my mind, neither one of them had been there for a long time. Taffy didn’t want to teach her classes. She wanted to stay in her room. I came and sat on the edge of her bed.

  “What matters is that she’s happy,” I said.

  “Is that all that matters? If that’s the case, we might as well say, At least Neddy’s happy. This was something I wanted.”

  “To see her wedding?”

  “To plan her wedding. To give her what Mother and Daddy gave me. I know that a wedding should be all about your love for your husband, and I loved Neddy, but the wedding was about me and Mother. The wedding was about how much Mother and I loved each other. I think that’s why you could elope. I know you loved Mother, but you weren’t ever close to her like I was. We were so close when I was getting married. I would sit next to her on the couch and we’d get a stack of magazines and go through each one page by page. We talked about every dress; we wanted the sleeves off of this one and the train off of that one. We went to Rich’s and picked out my china and silver and crystal. I remember she’s the one who found my china pattern. She picked the plate up and she said, Taffy, this is it. I swear, it could have been brown with giant sunflowers on it and I wouldn’t have cared. To this day when I think about Mother, those are the times I remember. And I feel like Holden took that from me. It was my one last chance to be a really good mother to her, and she didn’t give it to me.”

  “Oh, baby,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s different for you and Kay. You’re together all the time. You’re going to be close to her if she has a thousand people at her wedding or if she gets married at the courthouse on a Wednesday. But Holden’s gone. She’s been gone since boarding school. All this time I’ve missed her so much. I just keep thinking, Neddy wouldn’t have left me if I’d been a better wife, and Holden wouldn’t have married that idiot lawyer if I had been a better mother, and nobody’s going to give me the chance to make it right.”

  I stretched out on the bed next to her and she put her head on my shoulder. “I think you were probably a really great wife and a really great mother. Things just didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to.”

  “On what do you base that opinion?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “You’re a great sister.”

  Taffy laughed. “It would certainly be an overstatement to say we always despised each other, but I have no memories of our getting along.”

  “We’re getting along now.”

  “And in order to do that we had to come all the way around to the beginning. We had to have our bedrooms across the hall from each other again.”

  “See, every now and then you get a chance to start over.”

  UNFORTUNATELY, TAFFY HAD two chances to start over. After a sufficient amount of moping around the house, she went back to school to teach her classes. It was on one of those afternoons, when I was home alone, that Neddy showed up at the back door.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Close,” he said, and gave me a mock punch on the arm.

  I hadn’t seen Neddy in almost two years, but the Neddys of the world change very little. The only difference seemed to be that now he was very tan and the tops of his ears and the bridge of his nose were peeling. He was a big man in every sense of the word—tall, big-boned, and fat all at the same time. His hair had stuck around until about 1980, and by now he was left with only a fringe that he tended to wear too long and a couple of unfortunate scars on his head where they had dug out various basal cell cancers over the years. When he was out of the office, he favored yellow oxford cloth shirts and khaki pants and penny loafers with no socks regardless of the weather. Were it not for the fact that he had dumped my sister, I would have said he was nothing if not consistent.

  “Are you coming in?”

  The second he set foot inside the door, Stamp came racing around the corner barking like the dog he used to be. Before Neddy had a chance to step back, Stamp had his ankle and was pulling and growling. “There’s old Stamp,” Neddy said. He reached down, picked the dog up, and turned him counterclockwise until he had no choice but to open his mouth or have his head pop off.

  “I’ll take him,” I said.

  Neddy handed him over to me. Stamp was wild, snapping and yapping, minutes away from actually frothing. “That dog never did like me,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I put Stamp in Taffy’s room and shut the door. After a while the barking subsided.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Neddy.

  He waved his big hand. “Hell, I’m used to it. I buy these pants by the dozen. Some days he’ll bite me and some days he won’t. You just never know. He hardly ever gets any skin. It’s usually just the pants.”

  Sure enough, his pants were torn. “I thought he was doing better,” I said.

  Neddy turned a kitchen chair backward and straddled it. I have almost no memories of seeing Neddy in a chair that was facing the right direction. “I’ve come to see Taffy,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you were here to see me.”

  This got a big laugh from him. Neddy liked to make everybody feel like they were the
funniest person alive. “You got her stashed in the back?”

  “She’s working.”

  This stopped him. “Taffy Bishop has a job other than spending money?”

  “She’s teaching in my dance studio.”

  “Teaching what?”

  “Well, figure it out. It’s a dance studio.”

  “Taffy can’t dance.”

  “Actually, she can.”

  He rubbed his big chin with his big hand. “I’ll be damned.”

  “You know she’s been wondering what in the hell happened to you. She tracked you as far as Fiji and then you just sort of fell off the map.”

  “It felt that way.”

  “Did you hear your daughter got married?”

  “Yeah, I talked to her. I wish I’d met the guy. Doesn’t seem right, a son-in-law you’ve never even met.”

  “He’s a prince,” I said.

  Neddy brightened up. “You know him?”

  I told him I did.

  “Well, that’s good. I’m sure he’s fine, then.”

  It was about that time that Taffy came back. I’m sure if she’d had the chance to write the script, she would have come in wearing black cashmere and a string of pearls, but I thought she looked pretty great in her leotard and jeans. It had been Taffy’s intention to lift me up in the world of fashion, but I’m afraid I had pulled her down instead.

  “Hello, Ned,” was what she said to him. To look at her face, you never would have thought there had been a junior executive or an island called Fiji. You wouldn’t have thought she’d tried to call the guy even once. She put down her dance bag and went to the refrigerator.

  “Hello, Taffy,” Neddy said, his voice stripped of its bravado.

  “Posey Martin broke her ankle at the roller rink on Saturday.” Taffy stuck her head in the refrigerator and rocked slowly from left to right while she looked around. She came out with an orange. “Her mother stopped in for a refund.”

  “Poor Posey,” I said. Posey was a wispy girl with a bowl haircut. She had been a bad dancer and now it seemed she was a bad skater as well.

  “I would think refunds aren’t the best policy in a dance studio, but I figured, A broken ankle, cut the kid some slack.”