by Matt Dean
Chapter 15
From the guest room at the top of the stairs, Corinne heard the tink-tink-tink of metal on china and the ka-whump of an oven door slamming. It had to be Jodie, her sister-in-law, getting an early start on the big meal. That was strange, though, wasn’t it? They were supposed to eat at five o’clock, and it wasn’t yet nine a.m. Eight hours was an awfully long lead time, even if you were cooking for fifteen people, and there would only be seven at their table. A twenty-five-pound bird wouldn’t have to go into the oven for another three hours, and the turkey in Jodie’s fridge was a twelve-pounder, tops.
Corinne had just opened Poor Economics, a book that had lain almost untouched on her nightstand since before her wedding. She’d started the foreword on the flight to Pittsburgh, but Andrei had wanted to talk about work—the whole history of his project in Atlanta. In the whooshing dry air of the cabin, his over-caffeinated patter had washed over her and made her half-dizzy with sleepiness, but in any case hadn’t allowed her to read more than a line or two. Here in her in-laws’ house, she’d picked up the book several times a day, but something always came along to distract her—the television, Vic’s outsized voice, the clatter of sheet pans against the range-top grate.
There was, too, the familiar pinching cramp, the monthly pang of fecundity, right on schedule. She’d wanted a dose of ibuprofen and ten or fifteen minutes to luxuriate in miserable self-pity. Or maybe she’d just wanted to hide.
She got up and went downstairs. In the family room, Andrei and Vic were watching the parade and drinking coffee out of pint mugs. Corinne went into the kitchen, where Jodie was standing at the enormous island, peeling and dicing potatoes. She’d already cleaned and cut several pounds of them, with a largish pile yet to go. She worked quickly with her paring knife, dropping the slick white flesh into a vast pot of water and the gritty brown peels into a melamine bowl.
“Put me to work,” Corinne said. “What can I do?”
“Don’t be silly,” Jodie said, a little too breezily, a little too smilingly. She quartered a potato and quartered the quarters. “You’re our guest.”
“I’d love to help if I can.” Corinne leaned against the edge of the island. “I’m a whiz with a potato. When my baby brother was four, maybe five, he wouldn’t eat anything but mashed potatoes. All the time, every meal, for months. I was my dad’s kitchen helper, which meant I spent a lot of time peeling and chopping spuds. Every night we’d sit down to lasagna or moussaka or whatever, and there John Carter would be with a bowl of mashed potatoes and butter. And then, miraculously, one Thanksgiving, he asked for big helpings of everything—everything but potatoes. We kept passing them around the table, but no one wanted any.”
“Your Southern accent is just so cute,” Jodie said.
“Oh. Um.” Corinne felt herself blushing. She tugged her ear. “Thank you?”
“No, I mean it. You-all—” Jodie’s face reddened. Her attempt at a Southern drawl came out sounding vaguely Russian, or maybe Swedish. Nevertheless, she persisted. “You-all sound so charmin’.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Corinne said, her face still hot. “Are you sure there isn’t something I can—”
Jodie made shooing motions with her starch-whitened hands. “Not one single thing. You go enjoy your day.”
Corinne ambled away. When she came to the family room, she found Andrei and his brother staring open-mouthed at the sixty-inch television. The parade had stopped so that Daniel Radcliffe and a dozen men in suits could hop around while pretending to sing “Brotherhood of Man.” They must be lip-syncing to their own voices. Raw material for a joke, Corinne thought, but she couldn’t quite get it from setup to punch line.
She took a seat next to Andrei. The couch was so deep from front to back that her feet dangled off the edge. She tucked herself under Andrei’s arm, and he clasped her hand in his.
Vic waved his coffee mug toward her, and then toward a towering vacuum-pump urn he kept at his elbow. “Get you some joe?”
“I’ve hit my limit for today,” Corinne said, rubbing her belly.
Tipping his head back, Vic called out for Jodie. “Make another pot, would ya? Hey, Jo!”
“I’m fine, really, Vic,” Corinne said.
“It’s no problem,” Vic said. “Did ya hear me? Hey, Jo! Hon?”
Jodie answered from the kitchen. Corinne couldn’t understand what she said, but it didn’t apparently indicate an unwillingness to brew coffee.
Leaning toward Andrei, Corinne said, “I thought I might take a drive.”
Andrei peered at her. “Where to? Everything’s closed, ‘least till tonight.” After few days with Vic and Jodie, his consonants had started to grow little spines around their edges.
“My granddad’s about an hour from here,” she said. “He came to the wedding, remember? But I haven’t been to see him since I was, oh, four or five.”
“Vic and I are watching the games,” Andrei said, with a nod toward the television.
“Who’s playing?”
“Green Bay at Detroit, Miami at Dallas, San Francisco at Baltimore.”
With a twinkle in his eye, Vic said, “That’s football, hon. Touchdowns, not home runs.”
“Vic.” The final consonant of his name clicked at the back of her throat. She wished she were close enough to kick his shins. “You know what—?”
Andrei broke in. “What about dinner? Will you be back in time?”
Jodie charged into the room with a carafe of coffee. “Dinner’s at five. All the time in the world.” She set about refilling the urn.
“Thanks, lover,” Vic said. “You’ll make some man a fine wife someday.”
“If you find a fine man for me, you just let me know.”
Vic guffawed and smacked her affectionately on the ass. Huffing in mock disgust, she turned on her heel. He caught her hand and pulled her toward him. She leaned over him, giggling, and gave him a kiss.
“We could go tomorrow,” Andrei said, squeezing Corinne’s hand, “when there’s nothing else on the schedule.”
“Oh,” Corinne said, glancing at Jodie. “Tomorrow we’re—”
“It’s Buh-lack Friday,” Jodie sang. “Us girls’ve got doors to bust and deals to grab.”
“Like she said, doors to bust, deals to grab.” As Corinne got to her feet, she turned to Andrei. “So, then. I’ll have the rental car and…you won’t.”
Andrei stood up, too. “Okay,” he said. “You talked me into it. Let’s hit the bricks.”
“But I thought you and Vic—”
“Bah. He’s a lousy cheesehead.” Andrei ruffled his brother’s hair. “Better if I just walk away. Besides, there’s an inch of snow out there. Last time you drove in snow was exactly never.”
As they left the room, Vic called over his shoulder, “Your ma didn’t raise no Detroit fans, needer.” It took Corinne a few seconds to understand that needer meant neither.
While Andrei bounded up the stairs to fetch his wallet and keys, she waited in the foyer among the fat-legged console tables and iron-limbed chandeliers. She had to fight against disappointment. She’d been looking forward to the unique solitude of a longish drive on unfamiliar roads. Even with the GPS on her phone, there was the tantalizing possibility of getting lost in the exotic landscape of rocky bluffs and leafless maples. Now, instead of quiet and time to think and the pleasure of discovering new terrain, there’d be the well-trod ground of marital small talk, the long, straight, bumpy road of their customary arguments.
It had occurred to her, too, that she might find a drugstore that was open for part of the day. She and Andrei had made love the night before, moving slowly to keep the bed from squeaking, stifling their giggles like half-drunk teenagers. The sex itself had been remarkable, enlivened by the idea that they were getting away with something, but now came the worry and the wondering. What you’re saying is, you don’t want to have kids with me.
Andrei returned with his keys in one hand and her purse in the other. After helpi
ng her into her coat, he took her arm and led her down the snowy walk to the driveway. He handed her into the passenger’s seat of their rented sedan. The vinyl creaked like the wood of an old ship.
An inch of snow had fallen—Tuesday, was it? or Wednesday?—but by now the streets and sidewalks were clear and dry. The pavements were glittery and white with salt. Andrei drove slowly along the curved, nearly treeless subdivision streets—Appleglen, Oakridge, Kingsbrook, Forest Edge.
Taking her phone from her purse, she began searching for her granddad’s address. She’d expected to find it among her favorites, but it wasn’t on the list.
“What’s typical?”
“Developers.” She waved her hand, taking in the faux-riche houses, the bucolic street names, the very idea of suburbia. “They rip out all the trees to turn into toilet paper and toothpicks, and then they name the streets Oakdale Avenue and Forest Glen Drive.”
Andrei drummed the steering wheel with his fingers.
She went on. “Either it sounds like it was a forest lane until they paved it twenty minutes ago, or it sounds like the houses have been there since seventeen seventy-six. Even better if it sounds like both.”
After scrolling up and down two or three times, she finally found her granddad’s house near the top of her favorites list. He lived on John Street. There was a street by that name in Charleston, too, and she’d mistaken one for the other.
Andrei was looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Our living room window overlooks Colonial Lake,” he said. “The street where you grew up is named after a royal governor of the colony of South Carolina.” Her phone announced a turn. Flinching, he said, “Don’t turn that on yet. I want to show you something.”
In silence, then, they drove through the coiled streets. They drew to a stop before a red-brick Georgian house a bit bigger, a bit older-looking, than the rest. Hip roof, dormers, tall mullioned windows aligned in two perfect rows. It was of course impossible to tell from the facade how many rooms the house would have—but from the facade alone, it looked like it might have twenty or thirty. A for-sale sign hung from a yellow post at the end of the front walk.
Andrei leaned over the console to peer out the passenger’s-side window. “What do you think?”
“It’s…large,” Corinne said.
“That’s some mighty faint praise you’re damning it with.”
“It’s very…very…large.”
“What would you think about living in it?”
All this time, she’d been staring at the house. Now she cut her eyes at him. “I guess I’d think, ‘How do we move a house that size all the way to Charleston?’”
“Here.” He slipped his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it with a swipe. “Take a look.”
On the screen there were pictures of rooms, starting with a large square parlor and a dining room with hardwood floors and built-in shelves. A photo taken at one end of the kitchen showed it stretching seemingly to infinity. The four bedrooms were rampages of toile and dentil molding. Everywhere you looked, the lighting was magnificent.
“We can’t see it today, obviously,” Andrei said. “But maybe tomorrow? After you’ve busted doors and grabbed deals?”
“Is this why we’re in Pittsburgh?” She handed his phone back to him. “To see this house?”
“Vic just mentioned it yesterday. The current owners went off to Zimbabwe or somewhere to be missionaries.”
“How on earth could we ever afford it?” she said.
“The market’s still shit here. Housing costs are ten or eleven percent lower.” He polished his phone with the tail of his shirt. “If I get this contract, it’ll be long-term. I mean, like, years. They’d basically be hiring me, only the accounting works better if I’m a contractor.”
On Monday and Tuesday, he’d met with his prospective client. Afterward, he’d said almost nothing about it. Now that she thought it over, his silence probably meant he’d all but landed the account. He believed in jinxes. He thought that the Fates were real, that they enjoyed practical jokes and were susceptible to reverse psychology. If he had no hope of getting the account, he’d say so, as a way of daring the world to prove him wrong. By saying nothing, on the other hand, he almost surely hoped to hide himself from impish destiny.
He gestured toward the side of the house, or toward the gap between it and its neighbor. “You can’t see it from here, but their backyard butts up against Vic and Jo’s.”
Corinne sank lower in her seat. “We could live that close to them. Sure. Wow.”
Scowling, he said, “That’s so terrible?”
“I didn’t say terrible.”
“He’s my brother. You love your brother, too.”
“Brothers,” she said. “I have two. You met Ben, remember? He was in Afghanistan, but he actually came to the wedding.”
“Vic and Jo have two kids in college, Corinne. College is expensive, especially if you’ve got two at once. And they did send us a gift.” He narrowed his eyes. “They can read you, you know. Vic and Jodie. They can tell you’re judging them. Moping around, barely talking, hiding in the bedroom all the time. What was all that with Vic just now? So he made a dumb joke. He makes a lot of dumb jokes. You don’t have to lose your shit every time.”
Shifting the car into gear, he pulled away from the curb. He drove more quickly than before. At first, she assumed he’d call a halt to their original mission, or that he’d drop himself off at Vic and Jodie’s and let her go on by herself. But soon they’d left the subdivision behind them and the sedan rolled up and down the wooded hills and among the fallow fields of western Pennsylvania.
