“Oh,” said Tate’s mom. “Hello there.”
“Umhi,” I said, all one word.
Tate’s mom looked at Tate with one eyebrow up. She was dressed very nicely, in one of those asymmetrical gray wrap-sweater things, and had little silver hoop earrings. In contrast, I was wearing a particularly ragged pair of jeans and an old TGS T-shirt from fifth-grade gym class. I felt like a mountain troll.
“Mom,” Tate said. “This is Peach. Plum. Uh, she was just leaving.”
“Yep,” I said. I had never in my life said yep before then.
“Peach?” Tate’s mom said.
“It’s a nickname,” Tate and I said at the same time. My face got very hot.
“Um, I do have to go,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tate said. “Uh, thanks for the homework . . . stuff.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Then I gave Tate’s mom a weird curtsy-bow and rushed out the back door. Once out, I walked with as big steps as I could, and got home in approximately two minutes. (It was much easier to do without dogs.)
Back at 5142 Haven Lane, I slipped into the kitchen with as little screen-door creakage as possible. Mom was still in the kitchen, but Ginny was nowhere to be seen. There was a pause. Mom looked over at the door.
“Hi, Plummy.”
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “Ginny is having Thanksgiving with the Forsythes.” She made a frustrated sound and swirled her glass. “Am I really that bad of a mother?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with that,” I said.
“I try really hard,” Mom said. “You know there’s no school for this, right? I didn’t just wake up knowing how to take care of a huge house and feed and clothe and raise two girls.”
“I know,” I said.
“And I have this goddamn wine-and-cheese thing to plan, lest we forget.” Mom groaned. “Like I’m any kind of hostess.”
“I know.”
“And furthermore”—Mom gestured at the ceiling—“I don’t care for all of Ginny’s college histrionics. I’m not like, putting an insane amount of pressure on you two. I’m just trying to give you what I didn’t have.”
“I know,” I said.
Mom sighed hard enough to sputter her lips. “I guess this is why I have an emergency backup child, right? Just don’t go . . . eloping or anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
Granted, I had no immediate plans to elope. I had no immediate plans to do anything, actually, now that I’d done whatever I’d just done with or to Tate. I really wasn’t sure what had happened between us, actually, only that it really had to stay a secret.
It was kind of nice to have that as a secret, though.
Ginny being gone for Thanksgiving was actually not so bad. In fact, it was everything a holiday should be—calm, warm, involving candles and a dog show on television.
“I think this is the first time nothing’s blown up on Thanksgiving,” Mom said, thwacking at potatoes with a knife. “Literally or metaphorically.”
I did not point out why, but I think we both knew.
Mom made a pretty good turkey, and I made “corn thing,” which is a traditional creamed-corn casserole from Patience Mortimer’s recipe box that doesn’t have a real name, and later in the afternoon Almost-Doctor Andrews arrived at the back door with pumpkin pie.
“Oh,” I said. “It has little leaves.” I touched the crust reverently.
“I borrowed an egg,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said. “From the coop. I hope that’s all right.”
“Lovely!” Mom said, over the whine of the electric knife. I was keeping my distance, since I didn’t trust her not to inadvertently carve her daughter instead of the bird.
“Yes.” Almost-Doctor Andrews smiled, but not happily. Something was wrong. He was hovering, rather than offering to find a plate and carve the turkey, since clearly neither of us knew how. His face was flushed.
“Come sit,” said Mom. “Come sit! Can I get you anything?”
“Well,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said again. “All right.”
He sat but did not take off his coat, as if he expected to run out somewhere at any moment.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Well . . .” He looked at Mom, looked at the turkey, scratched Kit Marlowe—who was rubbing his back on Almost-Doctor Andrew’s pant leg and leaving behind a festival of tiny white hairs—and sighed. “They cut my funding. I have no teaching assignments next semester.”
“What?” Mom set down the electric knife—switched off, thank God. “On Thanksgiving?”
Almost-Doctor Andrews shrugged. “I . . . I was actually told at the beginning of the month.”
“But you paid rent,” I said. “I mean, the check deposited. Mom had me take it to the bank.”
“Gigs,” he said. “You can always pick up carol sings and maybe a church service or two. Musicians have a love-hate relationship with this time of year. I’ve been hearing “Deck the Hall” in my head for weeks and it’s not even December yet.” He closed his eyes and gave his head a little shake. “Anyway, I don’t expect that you’ll be able to keep me. I understand. But—”
“No!” I said, before I could stop myself. I looked at Mom, who had retreated somewhat into the folds of her Thanksgiving blacks. “I mean, we can’t just kick you out.”
“You can,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said simply. “I’m month-to-month.”
“But we won’t,” I said, before even thinking about it.
Mom shifted. Almost-Doctor Andrews wouldn’t meet her eyes. Underneath everything, a brass version of “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” trickled out of my phone.
“No,” Mom said. “We’ll make it work. I mean, Pamela’s paying me, right? And we’ve literally got food on the table. We can stretch.”
And so we settled, the three of us, on three mismatched chairs (one folding, one armchair, one swivel).
“So this is what it’s like being an only child, eh?” Almost-Doctor Andrews said, because without Ginny here yammering away, it was indeed very calm. Kind of like the normal sort of holiday normal people have.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, which was kind of an understatement. I liked it. It was the kind of day I hadn’t had in too long—since the beginning of the year, or possibly the beginning of my life.
“Any good projects in the works right now?”
“Projects?” I swallowed my cranberries.
“Books,” he said. “Or . . . poems? I’m not sure what you write.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Oh.” Almost-Doctor Andrews blinked. “Well, free time is free time. Better get used to it, right?”
There was even enough pie left for me to have a second slice.
But after the mangled turkey was dumped into Tupperwares and the “corn thing” was secured under layers of plastic wrap and Almost-Doctor Andrews had retreated to the carriage house and Ginny had come back, breathless and chatty and rosy-cheeked from the cold, going on and on about Sue Forsythe’s gluten-free gravy (you can make it with cornstarch!) and how much food there was to eat (two turkeys, one venison roast, and eight pies—eight!), dread started to seep into my heart. It wasn’t so much the ordinary feelings of getting sucked back into the school drudgery of math tests and sleep deprivation, but more a guilty kind of dread. The guilt that maybe I had gotten Tate into trouble, and I didn’t even know how to apologize for it, if I even should. Going up to him at school was out because, Weird Sweatshirt Kid that I was, it would inevitably arouse suspicion. Going back to his house was equally impossible, because his mom also lived there, and after the encounter in their kitchen, the last thing on earth I wanted to have to do was to look Tate’s mom in the eye.
Fortunately, I did not have a lot of time to dwell on it. Because that Saturday afternoon brought War and Cheese.
“It’s called Wine and Cheese,” Mom said for the billionth time, and gave her hands a nervous shake. “I don’t even get why you’re
calling it that.”
“Because it sounds like War and Peace, kind of,” I said.
“And because you’re acting like a total sergent de l’armée,” Ginny said.
“Right,” I said. “Because we all speak French and know what that means.”
“Army sergeant,” Ginny translated.
“Ohhh.” Almost-Doctor Andrews chuckled. We had roped him in to helping out, since it was a literal all-hands-on-deck situation. “War and Cheese. Now I get it.”
“Silence!” Mom yelled. She was having no levity that afternoon. “You guys are supposed to be helping.”
Everyone snapped to attention, myself included.
Of course, after the horrors of the Senior Tea, I was decidedly less than keen to assist at any kind of social gathering slash fund-raiser, especially if there was food serving involved. But since it was at our house, and Mom was in charge, there was no danger of fish sandwiches, and besides, Ginny was in such a good mood from her Forsythe Thanksgiving extravaganza that she actually volunteered to do some of the chores with me. And since it seemed like bad form to be the only Blatchley sister not participating, I found myself dressed up—in Those Pants this time—freshly braided, and even wearing a little eye shadow that Ginny had helped me put on.
Mom held up a legal pad and starting pacing in the kitchen (which really didn’t do much to dispel the whole army-sergeant thing). From her notes, we learned that our battle stations were as followed:
Mom: Obtain and disburse the actual wine and cheese; encourage party guests to pick up a brochure and a donation envelope
Almost-Doctor Andrews: Schmooze with people at the door; wear a tie
Dogs: Stay locked in the tower bedroom so as not to disturb or pee on the guests
Ginny and Plum: Light candles; take out trash; other duties as assigned
Mom had even drawn a diagram of what snacks and what candles went in which first-floor rooms. There was just one slight problem.
“Uh, where am I supposed to put candles?” Ginny came back to the kitchen with a basket of tea lights on her hip. “There’s nothing in the living room.”
We followed her out and realized it was true: the living room was down to a single love seat. No carpet, no credenza, no coffee table. There was the marble fireplace, but the mantel wasn’t exactly wide enough to fit all seventy-two of the tiny candles Mom had bought, especially because we used it as a gallery space for some framed originals from Five Little Field Mice Make a Friend. The only thing on the floor was a sleeping Kit Marlowe, and he did not look pleased at the arrival of humans.
Mom looked at Ginny. Ginny looked at Mom. I accidentally dropped one of my rings, because ever since I’d gotten them back I’d been very conscious of their presence around my fingers and taken to twirling them. In the empty room, it sounded like a bomb dropping.
“Furniture,” Mom said. “Shit. Shit!”
It seemed that, in all her careful planning for the War and Cheese, our mother had neglected one mundane but crucial element of party planning: having furniture—or, in this case, renting it.
“Damn it,” Mom said. “Damn it! Pamela gave me the number for the rental people and everything. And I just . . .” She made a mewling sound.
“Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi,” Ginny sang into the echo.
“Ho dee ho dee ho,” I sang back, in the manner of Jeeves obliging his employer in a round of jazzy singing before a night on the town.
“What are you doing?” Mom was wringing her hands. “That isn’t helping!”
Ginny and I looked at each other, and I giggled—probably more from nerves than anything else. Mom looked pained, or like she might faint, and there wasn’t even a big enough couch for her to do it on.
“This can be the dance floor.” Ginny jumped into the middle of the empty floor and scooped Kit Marlowe up into a twirl. Kit yowled, and I burst out laughing, now totally unable to help myself, until I saw the yet-more-stricken look on Mom’s face.
“Okay, okay.” She waved her hands in the air. “Shut up, everyone. We’ll just have to reprioritize a little.”
Thus arrived the following emergency addenda to the battle-stations plan:
Almost-Doctor Andrews: Scour house for any moveable furniture and relocate it to the living room
Mom: Avert her eyes and just hope A-D Andrews doesn’t scuff or scratch anything; set out the cheese to acclimate to room temperature
Ginny: Guard door to the library so that nobody wanders in and sees that 5142 Haven Lane has a big empty room right on the first floor
Plum: Light candles; take out trash; other duties as assigned
“Oh God, hurry!” Mom darted back and forth from the library to the living room as Almost-Doctor Andrews inched down the stairs, lugging the coffee table from the TV room.
At this sight, Ginny stopped abruptly, holding both dogs by the collars. She then turned to look at me, and I accidentally let a match burn my fingertips.
“Ow!”
Almost-Doctor Andrews stopped. “Something wrong?”
“We don’t . . .” I started. “That table is kind of . . . our dad made it.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Sorry to make you take it up again.”
Ginny didn’t meet my eyes. But Almost-Doctor Andrews said it was no trouble and took it back up, and with twenty more minutes’ lugging had found some end tables, card tables, and a freestanding bathroom pedestal that became presentable with the application of a small tablecloth.
“Plum?” Mom called as she threw down the last of the throw rugs. “I want to have the candles lit by four.”
With the dogs now secured in the bedroom, I sidled up to Ginny, who was watching the speed-redecorating from the doorway. “How’s it look?”
“Full of stuff,” Ginny said. “It’s like our own private Potemkin village here.”
“A what?”
“Ah,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said, smiling. “According to legend, a Russian named Grigory Potemkin used to build false villages to impress Catherine the Great.”
Mom folded her arms. She was, of course, wearing all black. “God. It’s not funny.”
Ginny threw me a look.
“It’s a little funny, Mom,” I said, as gently as I could. Mom took a longing look at the wine.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
Mom rushed off to the cheese plates in a bustle of black silk. Ginny yelled, “Places, people!” as if we were on a movie set, then thrust herself in front of the library, braced her arms against the doorframe, and growled, “None shall pass.”
Which left me, Plum, to answer the door.
From then on, everything was a blur—ladies in wraps, men in ties, hi-how-are-yous, nods, heavy wool piled onto my arms and ferried back to the coat closet behind the stairs, relighting tiny candles, picking up people’s crumpled napkins, smiling, smiling, smiling. It was raining, too, which meant that the coats people gave me got gradually more and more soggy. But I bore it gamely, because nothing distracts you from personal turmoil like relighting tiny candles and bundling up big bags of trash.
Speaking of the trash, I wasn’t sure what to do with all the bags, since it was raining.
“Just . . . throw them in the basement, or something,” Mom told me. She was clutching a little plastic glass of wine, which I had not seen at a level less than nearly full to the brim since the party had begun. Also, judging by the flush in her ordinarily very pale cheeks, it was not her first. “You can take them outside when it stops raining.”
I told her I would, and that she was doing great, by the way, and then hustled to the kitchen to throw out the bags. To her credit, Mom was doing a really good job of pretending to be normal. I think Mom is actually a way better hostess than she admits, to herself or to anyone else. For one thing, she’d bought about a metric ton of cheese, which was spread over the Potemkin side tables in attractive slices and rounds and creamy little hunks. For a
nother, she was not saying too many things, which is generally a good strategy for someone as easily flustered as she is.
I’d pitched about five bags full of little napkins and toothpicks down to the basement when the doorbell rang for the last time. I remember thinking it was weird that someone was arriving so late, but not enough to truly give me pause.
In the five steps it took me to cross the part of the front hall formerly covered by the antique Oriental runner with the elephant border, I did a quick physical inventory. Clothes (Those Pants, a yellow green boatneck top with no cartoon cat on it, dangly green earrings): normal. Hair (reverse French braid): regular. Makeup (borrowed mostly from Ginny, checked in my reflection in the window door): fine. There was absolutely no reason that my appearance would incur any kind of awkwardness-inducing commentary.
Thus reassured, I swung open the door and found myself face-to-face with Alicia Feingold formerly Kurokawa née Tate.
For a tiny, frozen second, time stood still. The expression time stood still had always struck me as, at best, hyperbolic and, at worst, a total impossibility of physics. But I swear, when I saw Alicia Feingold formerly Kurokawa née Tate on our welcome mat, I experienced a moment of pure, atemporal panic.
“Oh,” said Tate’s mom. “It’s you. Hello, you.”
Outside, it was now pouring rain, and she was really drippy. I still felt a little frozen.
“May I come in?” she said, after I said nothing.
“Yes!” I said, much too enthusiastically. “Please come in.”
She did, after daintily wiping her feet on the doormat, which I realized too late read GO AWAY (obviously as a joke, but still, not the kind of joke you want to be making where the fate of your mother’s job hangs upon her ability to be hospitable).
“May I take your coat?” I asked, hopefully politely.
Tate’s mom nodded. “Thank you.”
She set her purse on the mail table, which was mercifully still there, and shrugged out of her coat. Alicia Feingold formerly Kurokawa née Tate, unlike Mom, seemed to own party clothes that weren’t only not black, but were also the right size, which was probably something like a triple extra small. She had on a cocktail dress in some kind of crepe material that went from red to bronze depending on how the light hit it.
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