by Jean Stone
He turned around.
She smiled a little. “We need to talk,” she said.
There it was; he’d hoped that he’d been wrong. “More tea?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Sit down.”
He thought that later he’d describe it as a squeezing in his chest, a tightening of the big muscle called his heart, that inched its way down to his stomach, then his legs, then back up to his head and out to both his arms.
He sat down on the couch. She sat across from him, on the overstuffed armchair.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “But someone must.”
He wished the light in the living room was better. He wished he could see her eyes. “It’s the wedding,” he said. “Please don’t say you want to call it off.” He tried to say it with a touch of humor, tried lightening the mood.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t about me. It’s Cassie. You said she needed woman-talk. She did.”
His eyes darted to the fireplace, then back again. Should he light a fire? It was suddenly so cold.
Irene dropped her gaze. She inhaled a long breath, as if smoking a cigarette. Then she looked at Andrew and simply said, “Cassie wants to see her mother, Andrew. She wants to see Patty.”
35
Sarah had been excited when Elaine showed her the concept of the White Chocolate Lace Bridal Veil. They’d discussed possibilities—“Can you really make it?” Sarah had asked. “It would be unbelievably awesome, much better than an ordinary ice sculpture or one of those chocolate fountains that were unique when they were first done, but have become tiresome. It would be a real showpiece.”
Then Sarah said she’d love to stay and witness the outcome, but she must get home to Burch.
So Elaine had stayed up all night trying to make the damn thing.
She’d melted the white chocolate, added the shortening, and was careful not to get any water on top of the mixture. She’d used a fine writing tip on the pastry bag and slowly formed “lace” over the top of the foil, which she’d shaped into a small veil—for show-and-tell only, to give Irene the idea. She’d tried her damned best, but all Elaine managed was a big chocolate blob. Not exactly lace. Not exactly a replica of anything that remotely resembled a wedding veil.
At six-fifteen in the morning, Elaine concluded that she was no Bob McNulty; she was no gifted chef.
She waited until seven to call him. Mrs. Tuttle answered the phone.
Elaine pinched the deepening frown crease on her forehead. “Is my father awake?” she asked. “I’m having a chocolate-lace crisis.”
To her credit, Mrs. Tuttle did not ask for further explanation. A sleepy-voiced Bob got on the phone.
“I’m trying to make the White Chocolate Lace Bridal Veil,” she said. “I found your recipe, but I can’t make it work, Daddy.” The “Daddy” had slipped out. How long had it been since she’d called him that? She skipped over her embarrassment and quickly added, “Help. Please.”
He was silent a moment, then said, “Did you stir the chocolate constantly?”
She wouldn’t have remembered, but he’d made that notation on the recipe: Unlike dark or milk chocolate, white chocolate must be stirred constantly while melting.
“Yes,” she replied. She wondered if Mrs. Tuttle was still in the room. Elaine bit her lip; she wanted to cry.
“Did you let it get wet?”
“No. No, of course not.” Her temper grew short, as if this were his fault.
“Did you shape the foil into the form that you wanted?”
“Yes.” She feared that she was hissing now.
“Did you shape the foil, then put it in the freezer to chill?”
She stared at the white-chocolate mess splayed across her counter. “What?” she asked.
“The foil. You must freeze the foil so the lace can adhere to the form and then be released without breaking apart.”
Elaine stared at the mounds of foil. “No,” she said. “I made the form, but I didn’t freeze the foil.” She grabbed the recipe. In the upper left corner, in unfaded black marker, Bob had printed Freeze foil first, then underlined it. The perfect instructions had been there all along. She sighed.
“Honey?” he asked. “Would you like some help?”
“‘Help’? No, Dad, I don’t need any help.” What she needed was sleep. What she needed was to not have been as foolish as to have agreed to do this.
“When is the wedding?” he asked.
Elaine shook her head. “Not yet. But the bride is coming. I have to cook for her Wednesday night. I have to make a lot of the recipes—”
“You do need help.” His voice grew animated, no longer half asleep. “I can be there before lunch.”
She pictured her father and Mrs. Tuttle swooping into her kitchen with pots and pans and merriment. Elaine was too tired to be civil, let alone to pretend that such togetherness would be normal or fun. “No, Dad,” she said.
“I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” Bob retorted. “Larry won’t mind, don’t worry. It’s been a while since I’ve cooked—really cooked—but we’ll figure it out . . .”
He said a few more words that Elaine didn’t hear. She just said good-bye and hung up the phone and hoped she’d be awake to hear the doorbell when he—or they—arrived.
He didn’t sleep because he didn’t want to dream of Patty. He feared such dreams would evoke a rage of violence, as they had right after she’d left. Worse, he was afraid he’d dream of them having sex. Either way, Andrew couldn’t risk the emotion. It had taken too many years for the torrents to subside.
He didn’t sleep because he was on the couch and the cushions were fairly lumpy.
He didn’t sleep because Irene was upstairs in his bed and she had told him something that had just ripped his heart apart.
Irene, however, wouldn’t lie to him. Irene wouldn’t make light of Cassie’s wishes, or of Andrew’s pain.
They’d stayed up talking for a while, he and his first lover. She’d offered a few suggestions about how to handle this, but Andrew could only hear the words “She wants to see Patty.”
And now it was morning.
He hauled himself off the lumpy couch and made pancake batter using blueberries that Cassie had picked and frozen in September. He wondered if there were blueberries in Australia.
“Hi, Dad,” Cassie said tentatively when she came downstairs, dressed for her Sunday riding lesson. She tossed her hair back from her freckled face. When had she stopped wearing it in a ponytail?
“Hi, honey,” Andrew said, and fired up the griddle. “How did you sleep?” It was what he asked her every morning. Normalcy, he’d decided, might be the key to thwarting Cassie’s plan. Or to keeping himself together in the meantime.
She shrugged.
“Is Irene awake?”
“She’s in the shower. She wants to come out to the stables, is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay. She used to ride in Central Park, did she tell you that?” Normalcy, he repeated. Don’t react. Don’t be hostile. Don’t be negative.
“She had her own horse,” Cassie informed him.
He hadn’t known that. But then, Irene had always been a member of the elite set, one of the social-register ladies who had not known what was appropriate to do when her husband cheated on her.
He flipped the pancakes over. He waited for a moment, wondering if he should fill the blank air in the kitchen with a few vowels, as if this were Wheel of Fortune and he needed more pointless words.
He checked the underside; the cakes were golden. He slid them onto a plate without his usual flair. He set the plate on the table in front of Cassie. So far, amazingly, he had not lost his cool.
“Mmm,” she said. “Blueberries.”
He sat in the chair across from her, propped his elbows on the table, and rested his chin in them. “So, you had fun with Irene yesterday?”
Cassie’s eyes drifted to the right, then left, then down to her
plate. “Yes.”
One of the most unacclaimed talents of a parent, Andrew realized, was the ability to appear calm and collected on the outside, while on the inside feeling shredded like the beef and pork at Bubba’s Bar-B-Cue. But because this knack, this skill, this art form, one could call it, tended to be fleeting (at least for him), he knew he’d better get things out there on the old oak table before he felt himself implode.
“You want to see your mother?” he asked with someone else’s voice, someone older, meeker.
She drowned the blueberries in one-hundred-percent Vermont maple syrup, the best, or so Andrew had been told. She shrugged again.
He leaned across the table and touched her hand. “Honey,” he said, “it’s okay.” He’d have won the parenting prize this time, if only someone had been around to watch his remarkable performance. If only his voice would return to its usual state.
With a slow lift of those long-lashed lids, she brought her Patty-eyes up to meet his. “It is?” she asked.
“Well, it’s okay that you want to see her. But I didn’t think you did. It was only a few weeks ago I mentioned taking you. You said it was a lame idea.”
Cassie lowered her eyes. He remembered that, at age eleven, a few weeks could seem like months. “But it’s okay if you changed your mind.”
“I did.”
He patted her hand. “Honey, it’s just that she has a new life now, remember?”
“I remember, Dad. I saw the picture. The one of her with that new baby, Gilbert Grape.”
It would not be an appropriate time to laugh, so Andrew didn’t. “I think they only call him Gilbert.”
“It’s a dumb name.”
He took his hand away from hers. “Maybe you should write your mom a letter,” he said. “See what she thinks about you going for a visit.” He didn’t know what would hurt worse: Cassie going to Australia, or feeling her pain when Patty turned her down. But how could he deny her this?
“I was thinking I could call her,” she said. “Or send an e-mail.”
“I didn’t know she had an e-mail address.”
“Everybody has one, Dad. She sent it to me a while ago. I wrote her a couple of times.”
He didn’t ask if Cassie had ever received an answer. “Well, okay then, maybe an e-mail might be better. Calling might take her off guard, you know?” Just because Patty had left them didn’t mean she’d take it out on Cassie, did it? Now that Patty was a mother again . . . now that she seemed, God help Andrew, settled?
He patted her hand. “Why don’t you write to her tonight after we bring Irene to the inn? I’ll tell your mother it’s all right with me—if you want me to.”
She seemed appeased. She poked a blueberry with her fork and stuck it in her mouth. “Okay, Dad. Thanks.”
He stood up with a smile, ruffled her hair, then turned back to the sink so she couldn’t see his face in case he began to cry.
Jo had driven the butcher-shop van to the airport in Hartford so there would be enough room for her mother, Ted, and their honeymoon suitcases. Originally—way back at her mother’s wedding—she’d planned to ask Andrew if he and Cassie would like to go for the ride. But as the van had rumbled east on the turnpike toward Route 91, Jo had realized that, like most things in her life, she’d ended up going alone.
Marion and Ted walked through the gate laughing and holding hands; at first Jo felt awkward at the newness of that, then she felt envy. As with Elaine and her father, Jo wondered why she was so often left out.
She kissed each of them.
They’d had a wonderful time.
Ted had climbed into the back so “the girls” could catch up; he nonetheless talked from the airport north to Springfield about the olive groves and the prosciutto factories and the miles of vineyards they had visited. He must have tired himself out, for somewhere around Westfield, he rested his head and fell sound asleep.
Jo smiled at her mother. “You’re happy, aren’t you, Mom?”
Marion nodded. “Very happy.”
Jo sighed.
“Have you been busy since we’ve been gone? How is the business? How is everyone?”
She told her that Irene was coming. She told her about all the bookings they had. She told her that she’d been staying at the house because of that stupid man she’d gone out with. Then, Jo told her about Andrew.
Marion listened. When Jo got to the part about Lily’s prank, Marion held up her hand. “Not fair,” she said.
“No kidding,” Jo said. “I still can’t believe I—we—trusted him.”
But Marion shook her head. “No,” she said. “What isn’t fair is that you haven’t given Andrew a chance. You haven’t heard his side.”
“‘His side’? What? We should hear more lies?”
“You’re angry,” she said.
“You bet I am.”
Marion clutched a handsome leather handbag Jo hadn’t seen before. Maybe she’d bought it in Florence, a symbol of her wonderful new life. “All men aren’t bastards,” Marion said.
It started to rain. Jo looked for the knob, then turned on the wipers. “I wonder sometimes,” she replied.
The wipers squeaked for a moment, then Marion said, “It wasn’t all his fault, you know. It wasn’t only your father’s fault he left.”
Jo stared through the cellophane-like windshield. “We weren’t talking about him. We were talking about Andrew.”
But Marion persisted. “I was to blame, too, Josephine. I was certainly to blame that your father never saw you, that you hardly heard from him. I was a madwoman when he left. I never gave him a reason to stay. I never gave him a reason not to run off to Great Barrington with that woman.”
Great Barrington? That was the first time Jo had heard where her father had gone . . . or that her mother even had known.
“When he died,” Marion continued, “no one was more shocked than I was. I always thought he’d come back to us. I always thought I’d get to hear his side of the story, and that we would make things right.”
Jo shifted uncomfortably on the old leather seat. She did not want to be having this conversation right now, what with her mother just back from her honeymoon and Ted sleeping in the back.
“As for Andrew,” Marion continued, “no matter what he has or hasn’t done, he has been a good friend to you and your friends. My best advice is to give him a chance. Wait to hear his side of the story.”
She seemed not to have noticed that Jo hadn’t asked for her advice.
36
November was an odd month in the northeast. When the sun came out at all, as it did that day, it seemed pale, stripped of summer’s intensity, not yet ready for the assault of winter’s glare.
“It’s resting,” Elaine’s father had often said. “We should be resting, too.” The tourists, after all, were gone; it was intermission month before the ski bunnies arrived.
Bob McNulty, however, did not rest that day. He drove into Elaine’s driveway at ten-forty-five.
She went out to greet him, determined to be grateful for his presence, with or without Mrs. Tuttle. Larry.
The woman was not there, which may have been because there was no room left in Bob’s old town car: the passenger seat, the backseat, and the floors in both places were filled with storage cartons from Staples.
“Is Karen around?” Bob asked his daughter. “I could use some help.”
“She’s at her father’s,” Elaine replied with some annoyance. She’d wanted to keep this simple—simple and uncomplicated. She should have known that simple was not in Bob’s nature. She supposed it was what had helped him become such a success.
“Well, give me a hand, then.” He was dressed in the red-and-black buffalo-plaid shirt, the kind he’d favored every fall that Elaine could remember.
She ran her hands through her hair. She’d napped only an hour, then taken a quick shower. In three days Irene Benson would be at her house with the entire entourage from Second Chances. In three days Elaine had to prese
nt a full-blown catering sensation that would take most professionals weeks to plan and prepare. And she needed to do it in a way that would make Irene applaud and the others be grateful that they could check the potential problem of food off the list.
Three days. And her father wanted to waste time hauling cartons.
With grim reluctance, she reached into the backseat. “More recipes? I thought I’d found them all.”
Her father shook his head. “Your mother’s things,” he said. “I decided it was time.”
Elaine sucked in a startled breath. She jerked her hands from a carton as if it were hot-wired. “Dad!” she cried. “This is definitely not the time.”
He looked at her, his smile soft, his gray eyes a little tired. “When, then?”
The sun drifted behind a murky cloud. The air turned cool and damp, as if it were going to rain. “Dad,” Elaine said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this. That you lugged down all these things without asking permission.”
“‘Permission’? She was your mother. I didn’t think I’d need permission.”
Sadness framed his words. Elaine slowly inhaled, exhaled. She thought of her sweet mother, now apparently removed from the Victorian in Saratoga, now resting on Bob’s backseat and in his trunk, because Mrs. Tuttle had moved in.
“I miss her, too, Elaine,” her father said. “She is with me all the time. Right here.” He touched the pocket of his buffalo-plaid shirt, the one over his heart.
She turned her eyes from him, feeling a suspicious tug that she was being blackmailed, as if Bob’s help had come with strings. Strings and boxes and God only knew what was inside them.
Her mother would have smiled and thought her husband had been awfully smart, because her mother forgave everyone. She’d even forgiven Elaine for getting married “on such short notice,” for not inviting her family, for staying in West Hope, so far away. Her mother had said so one night before she had died. “It’s you, Elaine,” she had said. “It’s you who have not forgiven yourself.”
Elaine stared at the cartons, aware that her father stood, waiting. She supposed she should at least be happy that he’d come alone. “Well, all right, then,” she said, then heaved out the first box. “But let’s do this fast. We have work to do.”