“So tell me more about yourself, Phoebe,” said Jerry’s mother. She passed the sweet potatoes with marshmallows across the table to me and smiled, the little metal hooks of her bridgework showing. I could see where Jerry got his talent for cooking. My own mother’s version of a Christmas dinner was a row of cans opened one at a time and heated in the microwave, plus a ham. This was the first Norman Rockwell Christmas dinner I could remember ever having been a part of.
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“She’s a twin,” said Jerry. “She’s also an Oprah’s Book Club fan, and she has appalling taste in music.”
“Oh, Jerry.” This time she passed the green-bean casserole. “Are you really a twin?”
“Yeah. My father has a set of twin sisters, too. They seem to run in my family.”
His mother smiled. “Oh, my. Look out.”
“Good thing you like kids, Jerry,” said Stella.
Jerry took a bite of mashed potatoes and gave her a reproving glare.
“We’ve had twins in our family,” his mother said. “Your father’s aunt had twin boys. We have a picture somewhere. Two cuter little boys you never did see.”
Stella swirled her fork in her gravy. I could see her slipping into her role around the dinner table, the pesky little sister. “Maybe you guys’ll have quadruplets.”
“You want to live to see them?” Jerry asked.
“Knock it off, you two,” said his father mildly. Jerry’s father looked very much like him, tall and blue-eyed and honest-looking, but with a gregarious self-confidence that Jerry had none of. “So you’ve got what, Phoebe? A sister, then?”
“Yeah. Her name is Madison.”
Jerry’s mother reached for the gravy. “Is she married?”
“Um, not yet. She’s sort of working on that.” They gave me a quizzical look, so I continued. “She’s on a TV show where you can sort of win a husband. One of those reality shows. The finale is tomorrow night, actually. Jerry and I are planning to watch it.”
“Well, I should hope so. Do you think she’ll win?”
“She might. She’s been kind of, uh, pulling out all the stops.”
Jerry coughed and reached for his iced tea. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or choking.
“Are you all right, Jerry?” asked his mom.
“I’m fine.”
“Well, let’s all watch it together,” said his mother warmly. “I’d love to see this sister of yours. She sounds like such an interesting person.”
Jerry hastily swallowed his tea. “You don’t have to. I’m sure you’ll meet her eventually. I mean, if, uh—”
“Oh, nonsense. It’ll give us something new to talk about at the clubhouse. Won’t it, Allen?”
Jerry’s father shifted a mouthful of food to his cheek. “Darn right.”
“So,” said Jerry’s mother. She smiled at me across the table again. “Has your sister talked about what kind of a wedding she’d like?”
Jerry sighed and stabbed his fork into a piece of ham. Stella grinned at us from across the table, wiping Marco’s face with a poinsettia-printed dinner napkin.
“Maybe she’d like a double wedding,” she suggested cheerfully.
Jerry came out of the bathroom the next morning in a pair of plaid shorts and his green polo T-shirt, his hairy legs pale above his white socks.
“Please tell me you’re going golfing,” I said as soon as I saw him.
“How’d you guess?” he asked dryly.
“Do those shorts actually belong to you?”
“As a matter of fact, they do.”
“See,” I said, shaking a finger at him knowingly, “you did have a dirty little secret, after all.”
“You want to come with us? I’ll teach you to play. It’s fun.”
“Maybe in ten years. I’ll stay here and get schmoozed by your mother.”
And that’s exactly what she did, settling me onto the slippery plastic-covered sofa with a stack of dusty fake-leather-bound photo albums filled with pictures of Jerry’s Southern Maryland childhood. At least half of the pictures framed him in front of the long blue horizon of the Chesapeake Bay, crabbing or swimming or sitting on the grass at a church picnic. He had been a skinny little kid, his hair pale and coppery and buzzed into a crew cut all the way up until high school. Around age fourteen his hair was suddenly long and stringy, his clothes all black and covered with pictures of the Grim Reaper and skeletons with axes. In one he was crouched with his forearms on his knees, balanced on the balls of his black Converse-clad feet, smiling and squinting through the hair falling into his eyes. His mother smiled fondly.
“He was a happy kid,” she said.
I gave her a long, curious look. “Usually parents worry when their kids get all involved in heavy metal like that.”
“Oh, not Jerry. He wasn’t ever angry or depressed. He just needed an outlet for his energy. The only thing I minded was how loud it was. We got him a Walkman and then I took it away because I was afraid he was going to rupture his eardrums.” She turned the page. “He didn’t go in much for the serious stuff, the brooding kinds of songs. He liked the strange stuff. That over-the-top, ridiculous kind of heavy-metal music. He seemed to think it was funny. Teenagers. I guess they’ve all got to rebel somehow.”
“I suppose.”
She turned the page, revealing a picture of Stella with her Homecoming date and one of a sixteen-year-old Jerry asleep on the sofa, a copy of The Great Gatsby open across his chest. “I did start getting worried when he was in college. It wasn’t the music; it was the people he seemed to be meeting. A lot of partying. Too much, I thought. His grades weren’t very good, and there was all that drinking and smoking. It was starting to give him some trouble.”
“He said something about that. About the drinking part.”
“That was the part that was trouble. When he drinks, he’s a different person. It was good that he stopped. That was the responsible thing to do. I think the accident shook some sense into him about it, to know that the other man died and could easily have killed him, too. He got help after that, and sobered up.”
Gradually I took in what she was saying. The plastic pages crinkled as she turned them, the old photos shifting in their sleeves. “Well, they say the first step is admitting you have a problem,” I said, partly to fill the silence, partly to see what she would say next.
“Yes, that’s the thing about alcoholism. Often it takes a crisis of some sort to help the person face reality. I think his being in the hospital for nearly two months cut it off at the pass, so to speak. It was the first problem he’d had in three years that he couldn’t drink his way through. He’s grown into a good man.” She looked me in the eye. Hers were hazel, the green flecked with gold and brown. “You think so, too, I’m sure.”
I smiled anxiously. “I do. You made me a little nervous, though, just now.”
“He loves you,” she said firmly. There was a ferocious note just below the surface of her voice, restrained but fighting to be heard. “He’s quiet and unsure of himself at times, but there’s a lot going on inside of him. He needs understanding more than he needs love. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Her hand rested over mine on my lap, her fingers cool and somewhat leathery. I imagined the way they must have felt stroking his hair back from his forehead the way he liked for me to, smiling faintly, his eyes closed.
“He says your parents are divorced. Is that so?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then you may not know,” she said. “People always say that life is short, but while you’re living it, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s one day after another, years and years, and on some of those days and for some of those years, sooner or later, each of you will find yourself at rock bottom. You may fight. You may even cheat. You may say and think terrible things. You may find yourself wishing to be a widow so that you could start all over again with someone new. But if your spouse loves you, they’ll carry you through those times.
They’ll love you twice as much to make up for all the love you don’t have to give just then. And then someday it will be your turn to do the same. That’s what marriage is—two people with compassion for one another, so much that each alone has enough to hold the bond together.”
I nodded again.
“My son,” she said, “he has his flaws. Don’t be afraid to break his heart if you can’t abide them. He’ll be all right. He’s waited all his life for the woman who has empathy for him. He’ll make a wonderful husband to the woman who does, and a terrible husband to the woman who doesn’t.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I said.
She patted my hand and folded the album closed. “You’re welcome, dear. It’s the least I can do.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jerry and his dad got back around the middle of the afternoon, cheerful and sunburned and speaking animatedly in the foreign language of golf. From what I could interpret, his father had won, but Jerry had done better than he had expected. He steered me onto the sunporch and flopped down on the bed, rubbing his eyes and face tiredly.
“Sorry I was gone so long,” he said through his hands. “I didn’t realize my dad wanted to play eighteen holes. And then we run into his friends, and they start talking. You know. They all want to hear about my girlfriend, like I’m twelve years old.”
“That’s okay. I read and played with the kids and chatted with your mom all day. I wasn’t bored.”
He rubbed the corners of his eyes. “So what did you and my mom talk about?”
“What do you think?”
“Me, probably.”
“Yep, that’s pretty much what we talked about.”
“Should I ask?”
“She showed me pictures of you when you were a kid. We talked about your teenage years. She told me about your paper route and your first car. And your drinking problem.”
He put his hands behind his head. “Oh, yeah?”
“You want to talk a little about that?”
“There’s not much to tell,” he shrugged. He glanced at me, looking for signs of trouble. “I already told you all there is to say. Did she say something that worried you?”
I sat down beside him on the bed. “She used the word alcoholic.”
He laughed humorlessly. “Thanks, Mom. Always in my corner.”
“So you wouldn’t describe yourself that way?”
He sighed. “I’ve been sober for eight years, Phoebe. I was very up-front with you that I’d had a problem and dealt with it. You’ll just have to forgive me if I’m not all that comfortable turning to a girl on the second date and saying, ‘My name is Jerry, and I’m an alcoholic.’“ He pushed himself up on his arms and then stood, walking over to the doorway and playing with the dimmer switch on the light.
“Could you sit back down?”
“The light’s in my eyes.”
“Well, turn around, at least. I don’t want to have this conversation with your back.”
He stopped tinkering with the switch and turned to face me, pressing his back against the wall. A nervous look was taking over his face, the look I recognized from the first time I met him, trying to explain why I wasn’t Karen. It made me feel distant from him and that pained me.
“Your mom said you stopped drinking because of the accident,” I persisted. There was no point in cutting this discussion short.
“Yeah, that’s what she thinks, but it isn’t true. I’d already started going to AA by the time I got run off the road. She just didn’t know it until after.”
“Why was it, then?”
He hesitated. “It was because of the girl.”
A warm, oppressively humid breeze blew in through the screened windows that lined the sunporch, ruffling the fur of the cat who sat on one of the orange-carpeted perches. The cat closed its eyes and huddled against the carpet, the fine feathery ends of its fur rippling like goose down.
“You mean the first girl?” I asked him.
“Yeah, her, whoever she was. That sort of drove home the fact that there was a problem. I already knew it, I just wasn’t ready to deal with it.”
“You don’t know who she was?”
“Not really. Not her name, not her face, nothing. I can tell you she was a brunette and that she had on a yellow T-shirt from the Greene Turtle.” He gnawed on his bottom lip, bouncing against the wall with his hands behind him. “Yep, that’s about it.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean, not her face? How can you not know what she looked like?”
“Because I’d blacked out. No memory of that night whatsoever. All I know is, I woke up the next morning in a house off-campus, and there was this girl sitting on the side of the bed pulling her shirt on, and then she stood up and walked out of the room. She didn’t turn around, and I didn’t recognize her. By the time I managed to crawl out of bed and find my clothes, she was gone.” He closed his eyes for a split second, then shook his head. “It was bad.”
I twisted a corner of the sheet around my finger. “How do you know you actually had sex with her, though?”
“It seemed like a safe guess.”
“But if you were drunk—”
“Don’t overanalyze it, Phoebe. I was there, I know what happened. If there was any way I could have stayed in denial, believe me, I would have.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to make him regret what he’d told me, but when I thought of the way he’d been with me in the hotel room the night before last, tender and sweet and endlessly patient, what he was describing seemed impossible. The Jerry who would do something like that was so unlike the Jerry in front of me, I couldn’t even feel angry at him for not telling me before. Don’t worry, I thought, I know this isn’t you.
“I’d been blackout drinking for months by then,” he continued. “Every weekend. It was a joke with my friends, like, get a case for the party and a case for Jerry. But the difference between them and me was that they could stop after a couple if they had an exam the next day, and I couldn’t. I really just could not stop. And I wasn’t a funny drunk, either. I was obnoxious. Not violent. Just obnoxious as hell.” He sat down beside me on the bed.
“Not violent, though.”
“Never. They say alcohol brings out your deep-down personality, you know? So you can rest assured I’m not an aggressive person, deep down. Just an—”
“Annoying sex fiend. But I already knew that.”
He laughed. “With lousy impulse control. Yeah.”
“So why did that one incident turn you around?”
His face turned serious again. He leaned his elbows against his knees and rubbed his palms together. “The paranoia, partially. Every hour I was convinced I had a different STD. Plus, even though I didn’t know who she was, I figured she might know who I was, so with practically every female acquaintance that came up to me, I wondered, Was it her? Was it her? Is she expecting me to call her, or, Does she think I’m being an asshole? And, Oh, God, what if some girl shows up at my house in three months saying, ‘Hi, Jerry, I’m pregnant and it’s yours?’ It’s enough to drive you crazy.”
“Sounds like it.”
“And then there was the guilt. I wasn’t exactly waiting for marriage, but I was waiting until it felt right on an emotional level, at least. I figured God would appreciate that when it happened, my heart would be in the right place. And then the way it worked out—” He ran his hand back through his hair. His scalp was sunburned pink at the back of his head, where his hair was thinnest. “Even a month later, when I laid my bike down, I sort of suspected I was being punished for it. I know that’s not true, but it gave me something to think about while I was staring at the ceiling.”
I rubbed his knee. “People make mistakes. God wasn’t punishing you.”
“I know. He’s been good to me. I’ve got no complaints.”
Jerry’s mom stuck her head in from around the corner, in the kitchen. I rose immediately, like a guilty child. “Dinner,” she said timidly, realizing sh
e was interrupting.
Jerry stuck out his hand toward me. “Pull me up,” he said.
Jerry’s mother refused to be discouraged from watching the final episode of Belle of Georgia, and so at eight o’clock that evening, we all gathered around the sixteen-inch TV set in the living room and watched the nauseating pan-in of the camera from somewhere five thousand feet over Georgia to the front door of the mansion. Brent Holloway was standing between the tall white pillars with his hands on his hips, his white cotton shirt rippling in the breeze.
“Tonight, the incredible conclusion of our epic story,” he shouted toward the camera. “Join us as we follow the last struggles and final triumph of two amazing contestants—here on Belle of Georgia!”
A few notes of “Dixie” played as the show went to commercial. “Well, that certainly sounds exciting,” said Jerry’s mother.
“Just you wait,” said Jerry.
“Just as the struggles of the Northern and Southern women grew greater as the Civil War entered its last stages,” said Brent Holloway when the show returned, “so, too, grow the struggles of our lovely contestants. Only five remain, and now they must fight for the immunity that may make the difference between who goes home to the arms of her family—and who wins the love of one of our gallant gentlemen!”
A shot of Rhett and Ashley filled the screen, sitting on a couple of horses looking down at the camera.
“Which one is the gay one?” asked Stella.
Her mother looked at her reproachfully. “Good heavens, Stella.”
“The blond one,” Jerry told her.
“He’s actually bisexual,” I clarified.
“Sure, he is,” said Jerry.
“Today we recreate the realistic struggle a woman alone might have faced to protect her family and valuables when confronted with a group of Northern soldiers or a ruthless Confederate deserter,” said Brent Holloway. “Each step of the course must be correctly completed before moving on. First, retrieve your leather wallet from the dresser in front of you and place it in the diaper of the plastic baby doll. Next, holding your baby doll, load all of the silverware from the basket into the bucket of your well and lower it to the bottom. Once you have completed that, you must release your baby pig from its pen and chase it from one end of the maze to the other, then close the gate at the end, which is labeled ‘Swamp.’ Do not let go of your baby at any point or you will be disqualified. Finally, lay your baby at your feet and shoulder the rifle at the shooting gallery at the end of the course. You must hit the target to complete the challenge. Do you understand?”
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