Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “Let me guess. She didn’t pay her hotel bill.”

  “Jack went with her.”

  Kay’s eyes opened until they resembled nothing as much as two blue marbles. “That slut! He went with her to the hotel last night?”

  I smiled a little at this. I shouldn’t have but I did. I wasn’t sure if she was attaching the word slut to Holden or Jack. “Probably. Yes, I think you could count on it, but that’s not what I’m talking about. He went with her to Rome.”

  “What do you mean he went with her to Rome?”

  “I mean Jack traveled with Holden to Rome.”

  “Jack didn’t have plans to go to Rome.”

  “Honey, you’re not getting this. Jack and Holden—we used to call it running off together. There may be a more modern term for it now.”

  Her eyes stayed big and they never left my eyes. It didn’t start in her eyes, anyway. It started in her hands. They were shaking and she folded them together. The wave of shaking moved up like a seismic chart during an earthquake. Her stomach trembled, her chest began to sway, her shoulders rocked forward and back. By the time it reached her neck, she was red and her mouth was open, both lips pulling and shaking in complete independence from each other. Her nose twitched twice and then she started to cry. She pitched straight forward into my lap and she let out one long, horrible wail of the kind I had not heard her make since her prom date stood her up her senior year of high school, the long, baleful moan of a seal who has just watched her cub being clubbed to death on the ice. This was very bad. This was worse than anything I could have put together in a worst-case scenario. I petted her hair, her beautiful hair. I could feel the hot dampness of her tears as they seeped through my pants and spread out across my thigh. I rubbed circles on her heaving back while she cried and cried and cried. So she really had loved Jack. It was Jack she had wanted to marry all along. He wouldn’t even be in Rome yet. For all I knew, he was sitting in some American airport with Holden right now, holding hands, waiting to board their first-class seats on their connecting flight. I surreptitiously glanced at my watch. We still had an hour before lunch, which would be cutting it extremely close when you took into account time to get through the entire sobbing cycle, get fixed up again, drive across town, and find a parking space. “Do you think you can talk about this?” I asked, hoping to move things along a little. There was only more crying, not even a recognition that she had heard me, which maybe she hadn’t. Despite the fact that I believe Kay had royally screwed things up, I really did feel for her, both because a mother cannot help but feel for her child when she is in this much pain, but also because I guess I could imagine her scenario of wanting Jack and thinking that he would come through for her before it was too late. It wasn’t an honorable plan, but it was human.

  “Kay,” I said softly, hooking her hair behind her ears so she would hear me. “I think we should cancel lunch.” What I meant, of course, was that I thought we should cancel the wedding, but she would have to be the one to say those words.

  She sat up. Kay never used to wear mascara. She said it wasn’t made for people with soft hearts, but she had started wearing it since her engagement as part of her larger effort to fix herself up. Now she looked like a girl who had just come up from the coal mines, and my pants and shirt were so utterly ruined, I could only be grateful that I hadn’t borrowed anything from Taffy. “We can’t cancel lunch,” she said. “Mrs. Carlson and Mrs. Bennett will be there.”

  “Do you really want to go through with this?” I left the this indefinite.

  Kay nodded and I went off to find a box of Kleenex. When I came back and handed it to her, she pulled up five. “How could they have done that to me? How could they have just left together like that? They knew this was my time.” She looked at me. “It’s supposed to be my time.”

  “I’m not quite sure I’m following you.”

  “When a person gets married, nobody is supposed to go to Rome.” She laughed a little while crying. She hadn’t meant for it to come out that way exactly.

  “Are you in love with Jack?”

  “Oh, hell. I don’t know. I am and I’m not. But he said he loved me. He said he was going to change my mind. He didn’t even care.” Again she was crying.

  “So what if he didn’t care? You’re marrying someone else.” I suddenly felt my well of sympathy trickling away, the milk of human kindness soaking into a stone-dry creek bed. “I can’t say I had a whole lot of respect for Holden and Jack flying off to Rome, but that’s because it’s thoughtless to Taffy, not because it’s thoughtless to you.”

  “How can you say that?” Kay asked. She leaned away from me and got more tissue. “It’s horrible for me.”

  “What was Jack supposed to do, pine after you through your whole engagement, come to the church screaming, ‘No, stop!’ and carry you off in your big white wedding dress while everyone watched?”

  “He said he would do that,” she said.

  I loved Kay, I swear to God, I loved her, and at the same time I wanted to slap her into next week. “And what was Jack supposed to do if you never relented? Is he supposed to waste his time feeling rotten so you can get your ego needs met? And what about Trey if you run off with Jack? You want to humiliate him and his family, break his heart just because it was the only way you could get Jack to marry you? Or did you want to have them both? These are good men, Kay, and you’re a good woman, but you don’t get to have them both.”

  “I just hadn’t decided,” she said quietly.

  I picked up her hand, maybe a little too roughly. “You did decide. There’s your proof. You picked. You said yes. If you made the wrong choice, then be a decent person and give Trey his ring back so he can get on with his life. Then if you want to, you can get on a plane to Rome and fight your cousin for the man you love.” I stood up and tossed her Kleenex box on the couch. “I’m going to change clothes. If you still want to have lunch, you better get ready fast.”

  “I was never like Holden,” Kay said as I was walking away.

  I turned to hear her out.

  “I was never the girl that the guys really wanted. I was just okay. I was the second choice, the best friend, the backup if their date fell through. Jack could never make up his mind about me until I made up my mind about someone else. And you know what? It was great. The two smartest, best-looking guys both wanting to marry me.” She looked at me, her face awash in black tears. “It was great.”

  “Well, I’m glad you had some fun, but you’re not in junior high school now. You’re thirty years old and you’re a lawyer and these are both good men. I won’t say they deserve better than you, because I still think you’re a wonderful woman, but they sure do deserve to be treated better than you’re treating them. Now either call Mrs. Bennett and cancel, or wash your face and let’s go.”

  I was furious with Kay even though I understood her being upset that Jack was gone. I tried to decide if I would have been this angry if it weren’t for all the hell we had gone through trying to figure out how to get the money for this wedding. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so angry if Neddy hadn’t just stopped calling Taffy, or if Holden hadn’t turned out to be such a beautiful disappointment. People should be a little more decent to each other.

  We drove in silence to the restaurant, neither one of us willing to give in, or maybe Kay had given in but she was just too cried out to talk about it. We were meeting at the country club, which was old, venerable, and white, white, white, except, of course, for everyone who worked there. It was a place that Tom and I avoided like the plague and the place where Kay and Trey were having their reception, if they were getting married. I knew one thing for sure, this wasn’t the day I was going to bring up our money problems.

  Mrs. Bennett and the woman I took to be Mrs. Carlson were already seated in the dining room when we arrived. Mrs. Carlson was a very thin woman in her forties who wore a kelly-green suit and a diamond-crusted pin of a bumblebee on her shoulder, as if the insect had just lighted there and sp
ontaneously petrified into jewels. I was in a bad mood. Introductions were made.

  “Kay, darling,” Mrs. Bennett said. “Are you all right?”

  “I have a cold,” Kay said quietly.

  “She has a cold and she came anyway. Now, that’s devotion for you. If we were anywhere close to the wedding, I’d be upset with you for making yourself sicker, but you have plenty of time to recover. The wedding is still a year away.”

  “Trey and I haven’t decided yet.”

  Lila Bennett gave me a sad look as if I had failed her. “We have to work on that. Have you picked the color?”

  Kay said something inaudible.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Moss,” Kay said, the word barely eking out of her throat. If she had been a child, I would have taken her into the ladies’ room and told her to pull herself together. Instead we received our leather-bound menus and ordered. Kay chose the consommé.

  “You’ll need more than that if you’re going to keep your strength up,” Mrs. Carlson said. Mrs. Carlson who clearly had never eaten more than a bowl of consommé in her life.

  Mrs. Bennett put her hand over Kay’s wrist and squeezed. “It’s such a stressful time. Such a happy time, a joyful time, but people forget how hard it is, too, especially on the bride.”

  Get your hands off my daughter, I wanted to say. It’s my job to comfort her, and right now she doesn’t deserve to be comforted. I seriously doubted such a speech would have been helpful to anyone.

  Mrs. Carlson took out a notebook and uncapped her Mont Blanc. “There are so many details, thousands of details that go into a fine wedding. It’s more than any person could manage by themselves. I know that you and Mrs. Bennett have both been married a very long time. You probably don’t even remember all that went into your own weddings.”

  “I remember it all,” I said.

  Mrs. Bennett smiled. “As do I. It was the happiest day of my life.”

  The happiest day? Not by a long shot. It was a perfectly fine day, but it didn’t even come into the running when I thought of the birth of my children, their grade-school pageants, their graduations. It didn’t compare to the opening of my school. It didn’t come close to a thousand days I’d spent with Tom since our silly little wedding, days we raked up leaves, or played a hand of gin in bed before we went to sleep, or listened to a Chet Baker record with the lights off and then went to our room upstairs and made love. Nobody could tell me you could put a wedding up against any of that. “I eloped,” I said.

  Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Carlson looked at each other. Elopement was only a word they’d spelled out in crossword puzzles. “That must have been very Bohemian,” Mrs. Carlson said.

  I shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  Mrs. Carlson nodded and went back to her notes. “So I’ll assume you won’t be wearing your mother’s dress. There isn’t really much we can do until two certain people pick a date. The ballroom here is very much in demand. I have a list of availabilities, and I think you’ll see there isn’t even anything there within six months.” She handed the paper to Kay, who took it with trembling hands. “Everything comes down to the dates, the flowers you choose, the cut of your dress, even your colors. The moss, for example, wouldn’t be right for summer.”

  “It would be so lovely to marry in the summer,” Mrs. Bennett said.

  “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to be done today. Numbers, for example. Kay, have you and Trey made up your lists for bridesmaids and groomsmen?”

  I could see the weeping coming up again, the subtle movement in the corners of Kay’s mouth, the dampness of her forehead, and all of a sudden I wasn’t angry with her anymore. I would never be angry enough at her to let her bear the humiliation of falling apart in the country club in front of people she longed to impress. “Do you need to go?” I said softly.

  Kay nodded her head with no more than an inch of movement. I stood up immediately. “I am extremely sorry,” I said. “I told her we should cancel the lunch, but she wouldn’t do it. Kay really is feeling bad.”

  “If you’re feeling bad, then go,” Mrs. Bennett said, a genuine kindness in her voice that surprised me. “All of this can be done later.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kay whispered.

  “There is nothing to be sorry about.” And then Mrs. Bennett did something that I found both odd and very touching. She picked up Kay’s hand and she kissed it. “Go home with your mother and she’ll put you to bed.”

  “I’ll do just that,” I said. I pulled back Kay’s chair and she leaned on my arm as I walked her out of the dining room.

  “I should be shot,” Kay said, looking out the window at the line of Mercedeses and Lexuses as we pulled through the parking lot of the country club.

  “It’s not as bad as that.”

  “I’ve gotten very, very confused.” She touched her diamond ring. “I need to go home and get things straightened out in my head.”

  “It may be a good thing that Jack’s gone,” I said to her.

  “That’s the question, because it’s either a good thing or the worst thing I can think of.”

  chapter thirteen

  TAFFY WOULD NOT GET OFF THE PHONE. SHE CALLED Holden’s secretary at least ten times the first day. “You do know where she is. I even know where she is. She’s in Rome setting up a production for a film, and since it’s a film, I assume it’s business, and if it’s business, I assume you know where she is. Now, if you know where she is and you’re not telling me because she’s told you not to tell anybody, then I want to remind you that I’m her mother.…

  Well, do you have her number in Cap Ferret? Ferret. Like the weasel but with a better pronunciation. She bought a house there. Well, she has a cell phone. There were cell phones in France the last time I checked. Holden hasn’t gone out of the house without a cell phone since they were invented.… Yes, fine, you do that, but I’ll call back again. I may not know how to get ahold of her, but I know how to get ahold of you, and I will continue to do that until you locate her for me.… Good, then we understand each other.”

  She pushed down the button and dialed again.

  “Neddy? Neddy, if you’re there, pick up the phone. This is not about me and it’s not about Buddy Lewis. This is about Holden. Call me back.”

  “What difference does it make? What are you going to do if you find her?” I said.

  “I’m going to make her come back here. It isn’t right. You don’t show up and then disappear with some guy you just met. I need to talk to her.”

  “So you talk to her and she says, Mom, I met a guy and I blew you off and I’m really sorry. Then what?”

  “Minnie, I feel … I feel like everything is falling apart and I can’t stop it. I can’t make anything have order except for those little girls in their tap shoes. I just want someone to play fair, to be held accountable. I’ve had a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that my husband is a complete bastard. I don’t want to have to think ill of my daughter, too. I want her to come home so I won’t have to think ill of her.”

  She got out the white pages and started flipping through.

  “Do you think she’s still in Raleigh?”

  “Be quiet. Here, let me have your glasses.” I handed her my glasses and she looked at the phone book again and dialed the number. “Jack Carroll, please.”

  “You know he’s not there.”

  She waved me off. “Out of the office? Do you have a number where he can be reached? Yes, it is important. This is the U.S. Attorney General’s office. I’m holding a file on Jack Carroll in my hands. We’re reopening a case of his.”

  “Taffy, put down the phone.”

  “No, I will not speak to someone in the department. Jack Carroll was the lawyer on the case. Don’t tell me you let your A.D.A.s leave without a forwarding number.… Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  I leaned over and hung up the phone.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” she said.<
br />
  “When they trace this call, and they will, it’s going to look pretty suspicious that it’s coming from the public defender’s home number, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll call back from a pay phone.”

  “You’re insane.”

  She was dialing again. “Margaret? Hello there, it’s Mrs. Bishop. I’ve been fine, and you? … No, just out of town for a while. Visiting my sister in Raleigh … Yes, it is lovely here … Does she? Your cousin. No, I didn’t know that. Is Mr. Bishop—… Now that you mention it, he did say something about a trip. You know me, scatterbrain. Do you have the number? No number? Fiji? Are you sure? You think I would have remembered Fiji. Margaret, I have such a little question, do you know what? I think Ilena McNeal could help me. If you could transfer me to—Really. Now, that’s bad luck. And you don’t know when she’ll be back in town? I’ll tell you what, let me leave my number. Then when you hear from one of them, you can have them call me. Thank you. Yes. Good to talk to you, too.”

  She hung up and rested her head against the receiver. “I swear to God the room is spinning. I am going to be completely, permanently sick. Fiji. Now I’m going to have to track him down in Fiji.”

  “You’d be a natural in the FBI,” I said.

  “The FBI. Does Tom have any friends in the FBI? Maybe someone he went to law school with a million years ago?”

  “Not that I can think of. Who is Ilena McNeal?”

  “Who do you think she is?” Taffy didn’t look up at me.

  “God, you know everything.”

  “I know everything except where Holden is. There has to be a way to find her.”

  “You could get on a plane to Rome. I hear it’s a great city to walk around in.”

  “Too many cats. Besides, I’m not even sure she’s in Rome.”

  “I’m glad you were the one who said it.”

  “How’s Kay doing? Has there been any progress on the wedding front?”