by Jeanne Ray
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Kay said. “I have no idea really.”
“Is that the chicken with garlic sauce?”
Tom looked inside a couple of the containers and then he passed me the chicken with garlic sauce. “Kay’s got a big trial coming up.”
“What’s the case?” I asked. There was a time when I would have known. There was a time when Kay would have told me who she was defending and who she was thinking about marrying.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” Kay said. “There’s so much that’s going to need to be done, and then I try to think of that case—”
“If you need any help, I’d be happy to run up some background for you,” Jack said, heaping a pile of shrimp fried rice onto his plate.
“Best we don’t let the D.A.’s office take over our cases,” Tom said. “Not that we don’t appreciate the offer.”
“Just want to be helpful,” Jack said brightly.
“The drainage system in the original house wasn’t installed properly. For all these years some of the water from every rain has been running under the basement. After a while everything just starts to crumble. Are those the egg rolls?”
Taffy handed Woodrow the egg rolls and a couple of plastic packets of bright red sauce. “So the house is rotting?”
Jack took a steamed pork dumpling under the table and gave it to Stamp, but Woodrow missed it. I was quite sure that feeding Chinese food to the dog under the table wasn’t part of his training program.
“Some of the supports have rotted. It’s amazing to me, really, that the whole thing held up this long.”
“Is it safe to be in the house?” Taffy took a long drink and looked around the table. “I mean, there are so many people in the room.”
I leaned forward. I was interested in this one.
“We’ve put in temporary supports. The house is safe enough for now.”
“The contractor said ‘safe enough,’ ” George said. “Think how that’s going to sound in court when our dinner guests start to sue.”
“I hate to ask this,” Tom said, catching half the conversation to his left, “but how much longer do you think it’s going to take?”
“Counting the Florida room?”
“Sure,” Tom said. “Counting the Florida room.”
Woodrow pressed his lips together and leaned his head to one side. He was clearly going over some invisible list, but he couldn’t seem to reach any conclusion.
“It’s okay,” Tom said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“A lot of it depends on getting these other jobs finished up.”
“I kind of hope it doesn’t get finished until I graduate from law school,” George said. “I’ve gotten so used to Woodrow and everybody being around.”
“Law school’s only two more years,” I said.
“He asked me to dinner,” Jack said. “Would you have rather I said no?”
“Well, you didn’t have to say yes.”
“I’ve been coming over here since we were in law school. Now you’re getting married and I’m not supposed to see your family anymore?”
“You have a family,” Kay said.
“They always liked you,” Jack said.
“At least you have someone around who can fix things. If our living room had fallen into the basement, Neddy wouldn’t have noticed. I swear to you he didn’t know how to plug in the toaster.”
When the wine came around for the second time, I went for the red even though I had started with white. I didn’t want to wait for the white.
“What kind of work does your husband do?” Woodrow asked Taffy.
“He’s in the soft-drink business, I guess you’d say. Or he was when I left him this morning.” Taffy followed my lead and refilled her glass with red.
“What happened with Uncle Neddy?” George asked.
“Neddy found himself a junior executive.”
Sweet George, who I wanted to kill for bringing Jack to dinner, reached over the table and picked up my sister’s hand. “I always thought Uncle Neddy was an idiot,” he whispered.
“I’ll second that,” Woodrow said. “And I’ve never even met the man.”
Taffy teared up a bit in the face of kindness. “Neddy was an idiot,” she said softly.
“So what about wedding presents?” Jack said. “Have you given any thought to what you want?”
“You know perfectly well I don’t want a wedding present,” Kay said. Her voice was choked and I thought she might be following Taffy’s lead and getting a little misty.
“You don’t want wedding presents from anyone or you don’t want one from me?”
“Does this seem to be going south?” Tom whispered to me, one sweet-and-sour shrimp held aloft on his fork.
“That would imply that at some point it had been going well,” I said. We drank. The Chinese food performed a sort of miracle: The more we ate, the more there seemed to be.
“Tell me something about your wife,” Taffy said to Woodrow.
The doorbell rang. Stamp snapped the red leather leash taut and growled. Woodrow went under the table to speak to him.
“I’ll get that!” Kay said.
She wasn’t fast enough. I was already out of my chair. I was, possibly, even more desperate to walk out of the room for a minute than she was. I hoped that a pack of Christian missionaries would be waiting on the porch, all of them looking to save my soul. I planned to invite them in, get them each a plate of Chinese food. I would listen to them all night.
But when I opened the door, there was no one there to make me a true believer. It was Trey, the Bennett, the bridegroom, my future son-in-law. He was wearing a navy suit and a navy-and-yellow-striped tie. He was carrying a bunch of pink spray roses tied up in clear cellophane with a pink silk ribbon. It was a scene from a movie: You open the door and there is a handsome man with his handsome bouquet of flowers. The suit was handmade in Milan, the flowers had just been taken off the plane from Amsterdam. Every tiny rose was in perfect bloom. For an instant I wondered if he was stopping by to show me the very pinnacle of possibility for the spray rose.
“Trey,” I said. “Kay will love those.” I could hear the trace of complete wonderment in my own voice.
“They aren’t for Kay,” he said, and extended his full hand out to me. “They’re for you.”
I should have said no. I should have said, Kay’s having a hard night, go in and give them to her, but instead I reached for those flowers as if I was drawn in by their light. “They’re beautiful.”
“I’m sorry that we were so late coming by last night. I let my mother take things over sometimes. It wasn’t very thoughtful of me.”
I looked at the roses. There were as many as seventy, and each one could fit inside a thimble. Was it possible to even buy flowers like these in Raleigh? Without dipping my face into the bouquet, I could smell their rosy sweetness. “I’m leaving you out on the porch,” I said. “Come in, come inside. We’re having dinner. It’s just Chinese food.” I said a prayer. If there is a God in heaven, please let Trey say that he’s already eaten. “Have you eaten?”
“I had something brought up at the office.”
I gave the credit to the Christian missionaries in my imagination. “Well, come in and say hello. My sister is here from Atlanta, Kay’s aunt.”
Trey and I walked into the kitchen. The flowers had made me dreamy. For a moment I had lost sight of what I had left behind. Except it was worse now. Taffy was crying. She wasn’t crying hard and she was managing to more or less hold her eyeliner in place with a paper napkin, but it didn’t look good. George had his arm around her shoulder. Kay and Jack had their heads down and were bickering in low tones. Tom and Woodrow were both looking around the room for the emergency exit.
Stamp gave a short growl but didn’t bark at Trey, and for that Woodrow went down on the floor again to praise him.
“Look at those flowers,” Taffy said. “You look like you just won the pageant.”
<
br /> Kay raised her head to look at the flowers. She had forgotten that the doorbell had ever rung. “Trey.”
“Trey?” Jack said.
“Trey Bennett.” Trey offered his hand to Jack and Jack rose up to take it. It wasn’t the kind of scene that any woman enjoyed watching. Kay came out of her chair slowly and Trey kissed her.
“Jack and I went to law school together,” Kay said to Trey by way of explanation.
“But we’re on opposite sides now,” Jack said. He’d had a real spark in him all night, but suddenly it had gone out. He was no longer teasing Kay about getting married, now he was meeting the man she was going to marry and that was nowhere near the fun. He looked like the rest of us, someone who would rather be someplace else. “I’m at the D.A.’s office.”
“I’m always so glad to meet a friend of Kay’s,” Trey said.
The rest of the introductions were made. Taffy balled the damp napkin up into her left hand and extended her right hand to Trey. Maybe it had been a bad dinner, maybe we were falling apart, but it was good to know that we could still rally ourselves to our best manners when the occasion arose. Tom’s leg was stiff from having been up and he hobbled a bit when he went to fix Trey a drink, but he was smiling, grateful for an excuse to leave the table. While he was up he got out a vase and put my roses in some water.
“I’ve stayed so late,” Woodrow said, but it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. We had started dinner very early.
“I don’t mean to break up the party,” Trey said.
Woodrow patted Trey on the shoulder. “Don’t you think that for a minute. I got here at six-thirty this morning.”
“Woodrow has a life of his own,” Tom said, and handed Trey a glass of cranberry juice with ice.
“Could you give me a ride?” Jack said. “I came over here with George.”
“I’ll take you back,” George said.
But Woodrow said that he was going that way, even before Jack told him which way it was. They said their good nights and Woodrow gave Stamp a long scratch on the back of the neck and let him out to the full length of his leash. “He wants to be a good dog,” Woodrow told Taffy, and then we all said good night.
Tom started picking up plates, but I told him to go into the living room with Trey for a while. I think he would have rather walked around with the dog hanging off of his leg than try to make any more conversation for the evening, but he and Trey went out to sit with Taffy. George and Kay helped me pick up the plates.
“I’m thinking about killing you,” Kay said to her brother.
“He’s a nice guy. What were you going to do, let him read about it in the paper?”
Kay started stacking up plates. “Whatever I was going to do, it was my decision, all right?”
“I’ll clean up,” George said. “Go on in the living room and hang out with your fiancé.”
But then Kay put her plates back down on the table and started to cry.
“Oh, God, Kay,” George said. The sight of Kay’s tears threw every member of our family into a panic. “Listen, I’m sorry.”
“George,” I said. “Go into the living room. We’ll finish this.” I wanted to find a way to head this crying off at the pass. It wouldn’t be long before Trey would wander back out to the kitchen and then he’d want to know what Kay was so upset about. If she was to give in to the bout of weeping, there would be no stopping it.
George looked helpless and utterly guilty, but I sent him away. Kay and I hadn’t had a minute alone since she had come in the night before to announce her engagement.
“Do you want to talk about this?”
She put her hands over her eyes and shook her head, but then after a minute of taking deep breaths, she reversed her decision and nodded. “I want to marry Trey,” she said.
“That’s a good start,” I said. “What about Jack?”
Kay went over and shut the kitchen door, which was never, never shut. Then she tore a paper towel off the roll and blew her nose. “Jack is Jack. Jack is never going to get married.”
“And if Jack had wanted to get married, would you have married Jack?”
She sat down on the floor next to Stamp and unhooked him from his leash. For this act of kindness he crawled into her lap and licked her neck. “What I wanted was something simple, something really clear and straightforward like what happened with you and Dad. I always imagined that one day somebody was just going to ask me to marry him and that it was all going to make perfect sense. And then Trey asked and it felt so great. Trey is a great guy.”
“You don’t marry someone because they’re a great guy, you marry them because you love them, because you can’t imagine spending the rest of your life without them.”
“I know all of that,” Kay said, rubbing the dog’s ears. She had forgotten that she had been mad at him. He was a dog, after all. “But who’s ever really sure? Say a client tells me he’s innocent—sometimes I really believe him, sometimes I’m almost positive, but how do you know? I mean, were you sure? When you and Dad got married, were you positive that you loved him and you couldn’t ever really love anybody else?”
I put down my plates and sat on the floor with Kay and Stamp. I tried to think back, not to remember the funny story we told but to try to remember the day itself, who I actually was then when Tom sat in the lobby of my dormitory and asked me to marry him. My parents still sent me spending money every month. I had a picture of Anthony Perkins pinned up inside my closet door and liked nothing better than to stare at his sad, delicate face. I had never voted. My concept of time was divided into semesters. Was I sure about love, that this was the person I would be eating my meals with and raising children with and making love to for so many years? I had no idea. I wanted to tell my daughter that I had been absolutely certain, but I think what I had been is absolutely lucky. I don’t think that I knew Tom’s middle name when I married him. It didn’t matter. We had been full of a dreamy sort of romance then. Maybe we had excellent intuition about each other, but the real love came later. I think, probably, the real love always comes later.
“It was such a long time ago,” I said. A truly feeble answer, but what was I supposed to say? That marriage is a cliff dive? That you can do all the research you want, but you’re never really going to know if it’s going to work or not until you jump? That hardly smacked of sound maternal advice. Instead I said what a mother should say: “But if you aren’t sure, you don’t have to make the decision now. You’ve got plenty of time.”
Kay shook her head. “I’m thirty years old. I want to have children. There’s a wonderful guy in the living room who wants to marry me and who I am almost entirely sure I love. I don’t think it’s going to get much better than that.”
“Thirty is nothing,” I said. “It’s just the start.”
“That’s not what you would have said when you were thirty.” Kay mopped up the last of her tears and combed out her hair with her fingers. “I’m going in there,” she said. “Do I look all right?”
THAT NIGHT WHEN Tom and I went to bed I asked him, “When you asked me to marry you, were you sure about it?”
“Sure, I was sure about it. Why? Did Kay say she wasn’t sure?”
The room was dark. I propped up on one elbow and looked at what little I could see of my husband’s head on his pillow. I had been looking at him for more than two-thirds of my life. In the bad light, with my glasses off, he was exactly the boy I had married. Tom at twenty-three was in bed next to me, wanting to get some sleep. “Let’s forget about Kay for one minute.”
“I can do that.”
“When you asked me to marry you, was it because you were sure I was the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with?”
“I guess I must have been if I asked you.”
I had lived too long with lawyers to accept that as an answer. “Come on now and think about this for a minute. I’m serious. Why did you ask me to marry you?”
Tom sighed and closed his eyes. I knew exactl
y what he was thinking: His daughter was getting married, his sister-in-law had moved in, his house was falling down, he’d been bitten by a dog, and now his wife wanted to know why they had gotten married. It was too much for a Wednesday. “We had had that fight.”
“The fight no one can remember.”
Tom was quiet for a minute. “I remember it.”
“Are you serious? All these years we’ve told the kids we couldn’t remember and you knew? What was the fight about?”
“Basketball.”
“We broke up over basketball?”
“I had promised to take you out to dinner for your birthday, but then at the last minute I got tickets to the Duke-Alabama game and so I told you I was sick.”
And there it was, the missing piece of the story, the least important element: the fight that had been obliterated by its own outcome. Once prompted, I could half remember it: I had made some sort of soup. Chicken soup. I made the noodles myself in the kitchen of a friend who had an apartment. I spent my birthday making noodles and soup, and when I took it over to Tom’s, his roommate told me he had gone to the game. At the time I’m certain I had been furious, but now it seemed funny. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you remembered?”
“Why do you think? It didn’t come up for ten years, and when it finally did, I was thrilled that you had forgotten. I’d done something stupid and you had the decency to forget it.”
“So why did you want to marry me?”
Tom mulled over the question in the dark. Maybe he hadn’t thought about it in forty-two years, or maybe he had never thought about it, but the answer was a long time coming. “It was the soup, I think,” he said finally. “You had left me the soup even though you knew I wasn’t sick and I had lied to you. When I went over to talk to you that night, you said you could never date a person who lied and that was that. I went back to my dorm and I ate the soup. It was so wonderful. I kept thinking, Where am I ever going to find another girl who would spend her birthday making me soup when she thought I was sick? Where am I going to find a girl who would still give me the soup even though she knew I was a lying creep? The more soup I ate, the worse I felt about the whole thing.”
