One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  I knew Seth was there because his Audi was parked at the curb and he wasn’t the walker I was, especially in the rain. He also wasn’t one to sit around in a soundless house. There was always music or the TV or a YouTube video. Grey noise, he called it. When I’d checked my cell phone in the car, it was only five o’clock. No way he was taking a nap. I was the napper. If he was sleepy during the day he got on the treadmill.

  I listened. I didn’t hear that either.

  These were the times when my love affair with film did not serve me well. As I crept through the long dining room and into the kitchen, every man-shot-execution-style-in-his-home movie I’d ever seen suddenly vied for a viewing. I flipped through all of them in my mind and literally shook myself out. This was absurd. He was probably at his computer. He’d mentioned upping his megabits per second or some other Internet speed thing, a goal he worked at as hard as he worked at his abs. That’s where he was: so engrossed he didn’t even hear me come in the house.

  Internally swearing never to watch another girlfriend-discovers-the-body thriller, I grinned to myself as I went through the other set of french doors to the stairs and began my tiptoe ascent up the wide wooden steps. The computer was in the master bedroom—he’d promised to relocate it before I moved in—and that’s where I headed. I could barely stifle a giggle. Seth was harder to surprise than Leroy Jethro Gibbs. The Bridesmaids were right: if I pulled it off, this was going to be good.

  When I reached the bedroom door I fluffed out my still-damp hair and held my breath. That was when I heard it. A low, droning moan like that furry-soft sound he’d made over the dulce de leche . . . only thicker. And almost desperate.

  It was a sound that made me wrench the knob and shove the door open.

  What I saw inside became a montage.

  Of Seth jerking up from the desk chair in a spasmodic reach for a Kleenex box . . .

  Of the box tumbling toward the floor and Seth snatching it from the air and pressing it against himself . . .

  Of the computer screen exposed and filled with a thick mane of dark female hair that flipped back and revealed the head of the man she had been leaning over—and her own rolling, sweating, naked body.

  Seth turned and fumbled with the keys and it was gone. The screen went blank and all I could see was Seth’s face coming toward me.

  Or was it Seth? I had never seen that look of doggish shame. This was some stranger who came at me with his arms straining forward. Some person I didn’t know saying, “Tar, it’s not what you think!”

  Perhaps if he had uttered anything else but those lying words used by every man caught in an act of infidelity in every B-grade movie ever made, I might have reacted differently.

  Or not.

  No matter what he’d told me, I would still have been caught in an unwinding spool.

  Porn. He was watching porn. And not just watching it—

  “Tar, please,” Seth said. He reached for my hair.

  Rage ripped into the horror and I slapped his hand away. Slapped it as hard as I could and recoiled backwards from the room and into the hall, where a few moments before I’d stood with my ear to the door thinking he was eating my cookies.

  Seth moved with me but my straight-arming brought him up short. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Stop! Just stop!”

  He didn’t. I was screaming as I stumbled down the stairs, but he didn’t stop saying it over and over—“It doesn’t mean anything!”—as he tore after me.

  I didn’t stop either screaming or running. I didn’t stop until I was at the front door with my pink trench coat and my purse. I didn’t stop until he said it one more time, with tears clogging his voice.

  “Tara, it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Slowly I turned and stared at him. “No, Seth,” I said. “It means everything.”

  THREE

  I didn’t sleep.

  I went straight to my room, grateful that at least my parents were out, and I stood in the shower until my skin pruned and the water went tepid, and then I spelunked my way under the covers. But I didn’t sleep. Not until nearly dawn, and even then I was aware of lying just beneath the thin slumber line that could break through to awful wakefulness if I moved or blinked or breathed.

  I finally gave up when nausea brought me groaning from beneath the comforter that didn’t comfort me because nothing could, not even the thought I’d had every morning for the last 345 days: How many more days until I marry Seth?

  Only twenty until the church packed with loved ones and roses—and the five-course dinner for two hundred—and the custom-designed gown that ran my father into five figures. Twenty more days until the dream that had become a nightmare in one horrific glance at a computer screen. One sickening look at Seth’s face.

  I couldn’t go there again. I’d already spent the entire night in that place and had come out with nothing but what I was sure were eyes swollen almost shut.

  I heaved the covers back and avoided the mirror over the dresser as I made my way to the window seat. I hadn’t even bothered to close the shutters when I’d torn off my clothes and hidden in the bed, so the dawn-light seeped in unhindered. I grabbed the corner of a throw and pulled it out from under my wet coat on the chair and wrapped it around me like an old lady’s shawl. I did feel old.

  My fourth-floor bedroom overlooked Forsyth Park, an expanse too long to be classed with the cozier squares the town was known for. A Savannah early morning mist hovered, fine as romance. All I could see were the outlines of the live oaks and the Spanish moss hanging like grey wedding veils. And all I could think was—

  What. Am I going to do?

  During the night all I’d been able to conjure up was the scene on the computer screen and the look of Seth and the meaningless protests coming from his mouth. All I could do through the darkest hours was throb with the hurt and the horror and the disbelief.

  But now, with the lights winked on at Seth’s parents’ house kitty-corner from ours on Whitaker Street, all I had in my mind was what lay at stake beyond that. Beyond how it felt to discover something horrific you didn’t know about the love of your life twenty days before you were supposed to marry him.

  Obscene amounts of money had been spent on the wedding. My parents never talked about a number, but I knew how much things like sit-down dinners prepared by food network–worthy chefs cost.

  Out-of-town relatives with nonrefundable plane tickets and hotel reservations had planned their Christmases around it. Fritzie had rearranged her whole work schedule to come. GrandMary had already sent her grandmother-of-the-bride dress ahead so she wouldn’t have to carry it on the plane.

  GrandMary. I shifted miserably on the window seat. In a little over a week she would be sleeping right across the hall in the bed she and Granddaddy had always shared, the one Kellen and I used to crawl into when they visited from Williamsburg and snuggle with her wonderful smells while Granddaddy sat in an armchair by the fireplace and crackled his dry comments like the flames themselves.

  They were the reason I knew Seth was the One. When something amused them, something that couldn’t be acknowledged out loud, they used to nudge each other; it meant, “We’ll laugh about this later.” The first time Seth did that to me, I knew. I was fifteen. He was twenty. He thought of me as Kellen’s annoying little sister. But he nudged me when his little sister, Evelyn, said “hanga burger” for hamburger and I knew. I really thought I knew.

  Now what would GrandMary be showing up for? A wedding as false as reality TV? She would see through that. She was Virginia aristocracy and Tidewater class, and she saw through everything that wasn’t what it should be. Or would she come to find me broken and fooled in a way she never would have been?

  A figure emerged from the mist below, and for an awful moment I thought it was Seth, but it was Kellen, leaning around a bend in Forsyth Park on his run. He was shorter and slighter than Seth, and he’d recently shaved his head because even at
thirty his hairline was receding according to the Faulkner male tradition. But it was still easy to mistake him for Seth and Seth for him.

  They had been inseparable since they were five years old and we’d moved into this house on Gaston Street, diagonal from the seven-bedroom Victorian Seth’s mother, Randi, had inherited from her grandparents, just as my father had inherited ours from mine. Some of my first memories were of Kellen and Seth going off to school with their matching Spider-Man backpacks and lunch boxes while I stood wailing and left behind in the doorway.

  Kellen and Seth tearing around the park on their five-speeds as I tried valiantly to keep up on my pink tricycle.

  Kellen and Seth coming back from crabbing with Dad or playing tennis with Granddaddy, visibly more grown-up than when they left.

  Kellen and Seth.

  I let my forehead crash into my knees. Even I couldn’t envision telling my brother his best friend gave me the righteous purity speech an hour before he turned on a porn site and . . . participated in it. With that the avalanche cracked and broke and roared over me.

  Seth’s father. The head of one of the largest churches in Savannah. A spokesman for the faith in his books. A face of Christianity in the South.

  Seth’s mother, like my father, a highly visible community figure, both of them with careers that balanced on their images of integrity and values.

  Seth himself, an executive officer in one of the most respected Christian ministry organizations in the nation. A ministry that was all about living with purity in an impure world.

  Bring all of that down? Or pretend that, like Seth said, it didn’t mean anything?

  I dug my fingers into the throw pillow by my foot and hurled it across the room. And then another one. And then another until the window seat was naked and all I had left to throw were the words that spurted out between my teeth. Words I’d never said before and won’t now. They were the only words that could give voice to the rage.

  The nonprofane ones were these: Look what you’ve done, Seth. All I’ll see when I walk down the aisle is that woman. But what if I cancel the wedding? Everybody will want to know why, these people who love us. If I out you, everyone suffers. Look what you’ve done!

  I closed the plantation shutters so the Savannah below wouldn’t wake up to see me clawing at my own back and sobbing.

  When the tears ran out I needed coffee. I knew Daddy always left for work at sunup and Mama never emerged from the master suite until she could answer a question with something more than a grunt, so I thought I’d have the kitchen to myself. I wasn’t expecting Kellen to be there with his head in the refrigerator.

  It was a long kitchen—you’d be hard put to throw a lemon from one end to the other unless you played for the Braves—and I could easily have made it out of there without him seeing that I had everything but a decision scrawled all over my face. But I couldn’t avoid everybody until I did know what to do. Time to do my Julia Roberts imitation. I put on a big-toothed grin.

  “Don’t you have food at your place?” I said. I buried my own face in the mug cabinet.

  “I’m out of protein powder,” Kellen said.

  “I don’t think Mom keeps it in the refrigerator.”

  I couldn’t even make up my mind which mug to use. I yanked out one with Duke University emblazoned on it and turned to see Kellen dumping an armload of orange juice, frozen berries, and yogurt on the counter next to the blender.

  “None of that looks like protein powder,” I said.

  Kellen’s blue-like-mine eyes crinkled at their corners. “I figured why come all the way down here, get the powder, go back up to my place, make the smoothie, and then come all the way back to return it?”

  I stuck my mug under the coffeemaker and pushed the button. “All the way down?” I shouted over the bean-grinding. “It’s like seventeen steps from your front door to our back one.”

  “I’m conserving energy.”

  “I just saw you run five miles.”

  “Different kind of energy.”

  Kellen turned his back to me and commenced with the scientific concocting of a smoothie. It was another chance to escape, but I didn’t want to be alone with my head anymore. As wrenching as it was not to cry out, “Do you know what happened?” I could still draw on his big brother safety just by standing on the other side of the kitchen island from him. I always could.

  I had and still have no qualms about admitting that I idolized my brother probably from the first moment he leaned his five-year-old self over my bassinet and, according to family legend, said, “She doesn’t do much, does she?” followed by a cock of his head and the pronouncement, “Babies look like old people.”

  But it wasn’t long after that, I was told, when he took on the big brother role with all the valor and nobility of Lancelot. My conscious experience bore that out. At age two and a half, I was about to toddle down from the gazebo one summer evening when a moth the size of a bat flew right into my face and sent me shrieking back up. Seth, at seven, took my hand and led me down, one maddening step at a time, all the while assuring me: “I will protect you. I will always protect you.”

  I counted on that. Although in truth there wasn’t much to be protected from, seeing how we led a life more sheltered than the Obama girls. I don’t think I ever heard a swear word until I was in seventh grade. I repeated it to Kellen, who was a senior, and he made me do two things. One, promise never to let it cross my lips again. And, two, tell him who said it to me so he could take him out.

  I felt adrift when Kellen went away to college at eighteen, and the first thing he always asked me when he came home on breaks was whether any guys were hitting on me. When we went to Paris as a family the summer I was thirteen, he was more concerned about the size of my swimsuit than our parents were. I always thought it was a good thing I decided not to date in high school because no guy would have stood a chance of surviving. I didn’t have to worry about that with Seth.

  I realized my cup was full and the steam was already dissipating. As I made a halfhearted search for the cream, I had a flash of Kellen trying to take Seth out. I’d always thought of my brother as larger than life, but he was only a head taller than me and at least twenty muscular pounds lighter than Seth.

  Besides, it was too late for Kellen to protect me. I gave up on the cream and moved to the window in the breakfast nook.

  The mist had cleared and a bright, flawless-blue day was showing off out there. It was one of the three hundred days a year that the sun shines in Savannah, and it mocked me.

  “Knock, knock!”

  “Who’s there?” Kellen said automatically, although the voice was as familiar to us as the figure that strode into the kitchen from the courtyard door and took it over by sheer presence. “Hey, Tara, it’s your mother-in-law.”

  I sank into the padded bench at the breakfast table and tried not to drop my mug. On my best day, Randi Grissom could send me into a spin like a centrifuge, and today did not qualify as my best day. I turned to Kellen to telegraph Don’t leave me with my eyes, but he was already in the nook, tilted against the snack bar with his smoothie in his hand. He wasn’t going anywhere. Kellen loved to strip Randi bare until everybody in the room knew it but her.

  Randi headed straight for the coffeemaker with her Italian leather messenger bag still slung over her shoulder. She had straight, dark, collar-length hair that she made even straighter with a flat iron and highlighted in blonde. I knew she paid more to have it done that way than Vic made in a week at the Distillery, but in my opinion it didn’t really work. Although she could’ve been as bald as Kellen right then and I wouldn’t have cared. I just wanted her gone before I actually had to try to fake it to those eyes.

  Randi’s eyes were small and dark and snappish and intelligent. I’d never seen her in court, but I could only imagine the holes they could drill into someone she was cross-examining. My godfather, the district attorney, said she was a formidable opponent, which was why I had tried to stay on her good
side long before she became my future mother-in-law.

  “Help yourself to coffee, Randi,” Kellen said, eyes on me.

  “I shouldn’t,” she said. And then strode possessively around the island and set her mug on the table. “I’ve already had three cups. I’ve been on the go for hours.” She glanced at Kellen, said, “How’s it going?” and then didn’t wait for an answer.

  Kellen smirked at me.

  Randi took my left hand in hers as if she owned it. “Let me see that ring. You’re taking good care of it, I see.”

  “Hey, Randi,” Kellen said. “How much would you say that rock’s worth?”

  “It was my grandmother’s.”

  “No kidding? Have you ever had it appraised?”

  Randi held the two-carat diamond, my hand still attached to it, up to the sunlight, the way she had just about every time she’d seen me since the day Seth proposed.

  “Of course I’ve had it appraised,” she said, squinting. If I’d somehow defied the laws of geology and scratched it, I was toast.

  “And?”

  “I don’t give out that kind of information.”

  “C’mon, Randi, you know you want to.”

  “Do I? And that would be because . . .”

  “Because you want to establish the fact that the Grissoms are better off than the Faulkners.”

  “I think we established that a long time ago,” Randi said.

  Kellen took a long drag from his smoothie, eyes popping at me. Boom.

  Randi looked as if she’d just been jostled by someone in a crowd and wondered if she’d been pickpocketed. I would have enjoyed it if my mind hadn’t been screaming: Don’t say anything, Tara. Don’t even open your mouth or she will reach down your throat and drag it out.

  She finally let go of my hand and took a sip of her coffee and gave it an almost approving nod.

  “I hope we’re serving this blend at the reception,” she said. “Speaking of which, that’s why I came by.”