The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Now?” she asked. “Oh no, my hair’s a mess. Besides, that’s something you four should do on your own.”

  He felt relieved. “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  James picked up something wrapped in foil from the coffee table. It weighed a holy ton. He wondered if maybe Doris Mulcahey had stopped by after seeing him. It was only twenty-four hours earlier that he’d met her in her driveway, and yet it felt like months.

  “The Oriental girl across the street brought that over,” his mother said. “Wasn’t that nice?”

  James set the package down. “What is it? A cinder block?”

  “Fruitcake, I think.”

  “Ahh.” He kissed her cheek before heading back outside. “I’ll be back at eleven forty-five to pick you up for Mass.”

  “Make it eleven-thirty,” she said. “I want to get a seat up front.”

  “Okay. Merry Christmas, Ma.”

  She stood in the doorway and watched as he quickly shoveled the steps and the path. His back felt like it might snap in two, but he was pure adrenaline, and the rhythm of the shoveling calmed him some. When he got in the car for home, he told himself to relax. He couldn’t have Sheila wondering what was up when this was supposed to be her day. He would pawn the ring first thing tomorrow, and explain the extra cash by telling her that he won some major sports pool at work. She’d be pissed that he was gambling again, but hopefully so happy about the money that she wouldn’t care.

  By the time he got home, Connelly had already been by and plowed the driveway. As James pulled in, he could see Parker jumping up and down through the window. He laughed.

  The ring he had gotten Sheila sat in its black velvet box in the glove compartment. He pulled it out, just as he had pictured himself doing a hundred times. But now he paused. Suppose he pawned this one instead. He could give her the beautiful ring. Finally, something she deserved.

  Later, he would worry that she’d be even more unsafe now, wearing that ring around town. But at that moment, he removed the flat band from the box and switched it with Evelyn Pearsall’s.

  He climbed the back porch steps, shaking. The dog greeted him at the door, and James patted him behind the ears.

  “Merry Christmas, bud,” he said.

  Sheila had placed a barrier of dining room chairs under the hole in the kitchen ceiling. James looked up and could see the toilet and the sink upstairs.

  “Christ,” he said.

  The house smelled of coffee and cinnamon buns, and when he went to the living room, the three of them were there, his family. Sheila sat on the couch in her bathrobe and slippers. The boys lay on the floor by the tree, wearing their pajamas, shaking boxes to try to figure out what they contained.

  She didn’t mention the fact that he was late. She just stood and hugged him and said, “Merry Christmas. I’ll get you some coffee. You must be wrecked.”

  “Now, Dad?” Parker said, forgoing any actual greeting. “Please?”

  “Just one minute.” He went to the hall closet and pulled out the video camera. His show-off brother-in-law had recently gone down to Circuit City and bought an eight-hundred-dollar camcorder with a VHS tape built right in. James had the cheap kind, with the little tapes that he hadn’t yet figured out how to watch. But some quiet day, he would.

  Sheila returned with two fresh cups of coffee, and they sat side by side on the couch. There was nowhere in the world he would rather be.

  “Okay, now,” he said.

  “What does your hand say, Dad?” Parker asked.

  James looked down. Evelyn Pearsall. He had written her name on his hand. Fine fucking thief he was.

  “It was the name of a patient of mine that I didn’t want to forget,” he said. “So what time did everyone wake up?”

  “Four,” Sheila and Parker said in unison, she with a tone of despair, and he with pride.

  James pointed at a familiar package.

  “This one looks good. Why don’t you open it first, Parker?”

  Sheila gave him a look, like maybe they should have started with the socks and worked their way up to the robot, but James felt like there was no good reason to wait. This would probably be his son’s last year as a believer, when he had the type of faith that nothing could topple. There was something so goddamn special about that. James wished he could experience the feeling himself again.

  Parker tore back the red paper slowly, making a big production of it.

  “Could it be?” A tiny rip. “Maybe it’s?” Rip, rip. “Oh my gosh, Mom, it’s the Rolly Robot!”

  And now he was dancing around the room, shaking the box over his head. Danny laughed in confusion.

  “I knew it!” Parker said with glee.

  “Oh you did, did you?” James said.

  Sheila tapped his shoulder and whispered, “Did we forget batteries?”

  Parker came over and sat at his feet. “Hey Dad, could you tell me about the drive-in movie theater again?”

  It had been summertime when he first told Parker the story. They had driven by one of the old screens on the side of the road in Braintree. The theater itself had closed down years before, but no one had ever bothered to remove the screen.

  “What is that big white square?” Parker asked at the time, and James had felt about a thousand years old.

  “What made you think of that?” he asked now.

  “I told Danny about it as a bedtime story last night,” Parker said. “But I couldn’t remember how your cousins got out of the trunk.”

  James laughed. “Well, me, Uncle Bobby, and our cousins Brian and Jon went to the drive-in. I can’t remember what the movie was, but I know Jon was driving your grandma’s car for some reason. You had to pay per person, and we didn’t want to spend the money, so we made Brian and Jon get in the trunk outside the gates. Anyway, as soon as Bobby closes the trunk he turns to me and says, ‘Let’s go.’ I say, ‘Okay, give me the keys.’ And he says—”

  Parker interrupted, excited. “He said he didn’t have them either! Then you realized your cousin Jon did!”

  “That’s right,” James said. “We had to call a mechanic to get them out. It cost us fifty bucks.”

  “And Jon was crying in the trunk,” Parker said. This was his favorite part.

  “Yup.”

  “I won’t put Danny in the trunk,” Parker said in a serious tone that made James wonder if he’d been considering it.

  “Good idea. Don’t.”

  A half hour later, the kids collapsed, asleep in a heap of wrapping paper and Scotch tape.

  Sheila laughed, leaning in to kiss him. “That was a great Christmas.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll never guess what John Travolta gave my sister,” she said. “She called before you got home.”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “A car phone.”

  “What?” He had never heard of a real person having a car phone. It was the kind of thing you saw on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  “That’s stupid,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Hey, I think we can do better than that.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s one more present.”

  She scanned the floor. “There is? Where? Oh, the PEZ dispensers? I put those in their stockings.”

  He placed a hand on hers. “Not the PEZ dispensers.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the box. “This.”

  Sheila gasped. “James McKeen, what did you do?”

  She took it from him and opened it tentatively, as if there were something inside that might bite her. When she saw the ring, she said sternly, “We can’t afford this.”

  “I sold the Ford Coupe,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I sold my dad’s car and bought this, and there’s money left over, too.”

  He wasn’t sure if he should have added that last bit. Did she know how much the car was worth, and what a ring like this might go for? But Sheila only seemed stunned.

&nb
sp; “But you can’t sell the car, you love the car.”

  She began to cry, rubbing the tears from her cheeks.

  “It’s sold,” he said. “So? Do you like it?”

  She nodded. “Of course I do. Look at it. It looks like something a movie star would wear.”

  “Put it on,” he said.

  She slipped it onto her finger, and they both stared. The diamonds caught the glow of the lamp behind her, and sparkles of light spread out across the wall. It was the ring he should have given her in the first place, fourteen years ago.

  “Will you marry me again?” he asked.

  Sheila laughed. “Yes, James, I’ll marry you.”

  For a long time, he wondered if anyone would ever come after him, wanting the ring back. But eventually, after they moved away, he stopped thinking much about it. He felt tremendous guilt, of course, but that was to be expected. He could live with it. He had done what he had to do.

  It was two years later, around the same time, Christmas of ’89, when he saw the brick house again. This time it was in a segment on the evening news. He recognized the place right away, and thought about that morning, thought about Maurice, who had since moved on to a management position in Providence.

  It turned out Evelyn Pearsall had not left her fortune to her son and daughter-in-law, but to her two granddaughters, who lived on the West Coast. They had visited her every summer of their lives for a month at a stretch. They were tall and blond, maybe in their mid-twenties. One of them said they had both become teachers, just like their grandmother had been. They described her as one of the most generous women who ever lived, the type who had changed the lives of so many young people for the better.

  James felt tears stream down his face.

  Evelyn had requested in her will that a good portion of her money go toward building a community center for troubled girls and boys in Boston. For the rest of his life, whenever he got an extra bit of cash, even ten or fifteen bucks, James would send it straight to Evelyn’s House. Sheila once asked him why, and he told her that Evelyn Pearsall was a patient of his. She seemed like a nice lady. He said that maybe if he’d had someone like her in his life as a kid, he might have made something of himself.

  He knew it wasn’t the whole truth, but still somehow it was true.

  2012

  From every corner, the house was blaring. In the downstairs bathroom, May ran the blow-dryer at full blast. Her two sons sat on the staircase, fighting. In the shower, Dan sang a song from an old cartoon he once saw on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which he sang whenever anyone got married. It was cloying and catchy, and it always stayed in her head for days: Everybody’s getting! Ready for the wedding!

  The worst of the noise sprang from Kate’s own daughter, who had been screaming for fifteen minutes straight. They were due at the ceremony location in ninety minutes and Ava had selected this moment to have the biggest fit of her life. Kate blamed May for giving her Pop-Tarts and, on the way home from the beauty parlor, Chicken McNuggets from McDonald’s with a strawberry shake.

  Now her daughter was writhing on her bedroom floor in just a pair of star-printed underpants, refusing the dress, which was laid out flat on the bed, with the matching shoes on the rug directly below, as if whoever had been wearing the outfit had simply melted away.

  “I don’t want to be the flower girl,” she said through tears.

  “But you’ve been excited about it for weeks,” Kate said. “And you’re going to look so pretty in the dress.”

  “I don’t want to!” Ava screamed. She rubbed her head violently against the carpet. Strands of her braid fanned out around her scalp so that she resembled a tiny Medusa.

  Despite the fact that she was an aunt three times over by the time Ava was born, Kate had been surprised about so many aspects of motherhood, the parts you could learn only by experiencing them for yourself. The hardest of these was the crying, the hysterical sobs. When Ava was an infant, Kate would sometimes cry along with her, even as she tried to calm her down. She was scared the baby would suffocate if she didn’t take a breath, scared of so many things.

  It had gotten easier now that Ava was a fully formed person, with words and the ability to reason. But at the moment, Kate didn’t know what to do. She had never seen her daughter quite so upset.

  The effects of the whiskey she had shared with Toby earlier had worn off, leaving behind a slight headache. She wished she could take a nap.

  Ava lay on her back, kicking her, practically foaming at the mouth. “I won’t be the flower girl! I won’t!”

  Kate’s mother passed by in the hall, dressed in an eggplant skirt suit and heels, a cell phone pressed to her ear. She looked at Kate with the most judgmental eyes, as if Ava were having a tantrum in Mona’s office during a board meeting, instead of in her own room.

  Kate stuck her tongue out, which made Ava pause. “Mama, did you just stick your tongue out at Grandma?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Kate pulled Ava into her lap before she had a chance to start up again. Her daughter’s cheeks were red and hot from crying, and Kate pressed her cool fingers against them.

  “Lovey, why don’t you want to be the flower girl?”

  Kate imagined she might say something profound: I don’t like the idea that girls have to wear puffy pink dresses, Mama. Or I’ve decided that weddings just aren’t my thing.

  But Ava sniffled, and said sadly, “Olivia said that’s for babies.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Kate had the urge to grab her niece, yank her up the stairs, and demand an apology. This was something that she’d never do to a child, though her sister May would, in a second. She took a deep breath, trying to feel calm.

  “Olivia’s just jealous, sweetheart. I think she wanted to be the flower girl.”

  Ava looked suspicious. “She did?”

  “You can do whatever you want tonight, you don’t have to wear the dress. But I know Uncle Jeff was really excited, and if you cancel on him, you might hurt his feelings.”

  She could tell she had her daughter’s attention now. Kate walked to the dresser and pulled out Ava’s favorite overalls. They were made of bright green corduroy, and Ava had torn a hole in the left knee, which Kate had patched over with a swatch of fabric covered in butterflies.

  “You can just wear these if you want,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Ava shook her head. She went to the bed, and picked up her flower girl dress. “I want to wear this.”

  Kate took a deep breath. Crisis averted. Of course, there was still the business of the ring. She felt more certain than ever that Olivia had taken it. Was her niece trying to punish her? Would she put it back at the last minute? Or had she already done something crazy—swallowed it, or chucked it out into the woods?

  Kate’s mother popped her head into the room. “I just spoke to Carmen, and she said we’ll find the ring at the schoolhouse.”

  “Who’s Carmen?”

  “My psychic in Newark,” her mother responded, as if it should be obvious.

  “What schoolhouse?” Kate said.

  “I don’t know. Ava’s, I assume.”

  The only school Ava attended was a Mommy and Me class that met two mornings a week in the basement of a Mason hall.

  “Oh, well, if Carmen said so, then let me just run right over there and have them open the place on Saturday night.”

  “Don’t mock, she’s usually very accurate,” Mona said. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  Kate looked down at her jeans and t-shirt. “Yes, I’m wearing jeans to the wedding.”

  “Well, you better get going!”

  “It takes me five minutes to get ready.”

  “Hmm.”

  That hmm conveyed so much. It said, Yes, it takes you five minutes to get ready, and it shows. Kate remembered watching her mother put on her makeup as a child—standing in front of the bathroom mirror, or sitting in traffic, carefully applying layer upon layer, on top of her perfectly fine s
kin. The whole routine lasted thirty minutes or so. She couldn’t imagine taking that much time every day to add something you were only going to rinse off eight hours later.

  Kate helped Ava into her dress, and gently combed her curls, which looked prettier natural than they had in that stupid hairstyle anyway. Ava’s hair felt stiff in places where the spray had made it clump together. Kate couldn’t wait to give her a bath and watch it all swirl down the drain.

  “Do you want a magnolia to tuck behind your ear?” she asked.

  Ava nodded. Kate took her by the hand.

  “The tree out back is blooming,” she said. “Come on.”

  On the way, they passed the boys, still fighting on the staircase, wearing their dark suits.

  “Give it to me!” Leo shouted.

  “No, it’s mine!” Max said.

  “Fart head!”

  “Puss face.”

  “Be careful, you two, don’t fall,” she said.

  Boys were trouble. She’d been so lucky with what she got. She hoped Dan could hear them too, so that he might be cured of his desire for another child.

  Olivia sat out on the deck in a floral party dress, playing with her Barbies. Despite what she had said to Ava, Kate felt sorry for her. Maybe she should have asked Jeff if they could have two flower girls. She was a mother; she ought to be more thoughtful. It would break her heart if Ava were the one to feel left out.

  Kate sat down beside her niece on the wooden slats, and Ava plunked down too.

  “What are these?” Ava said.

  Olivia looked aghast at her ignorance. “Barbies!” she said.

  Ava picked one up, and stroked its plastic hair.

  “Will I get Barbies when I’m bigger?” she asked.

  “You can borrow Olivia’s whenever she comes over,” Kate said, in lieu of Hell no, you will never have a Barbie as long as I breathe air.

  It wasn’t just Olivia, she realized. Soon enough, Ava would be in school with all sorts of kids whose parents let them do and say and eat all sorts of things. The time Kate had left to shelter her was slipping away. Sometimes she wished she could put her daughter back in the womb, protect her from every bit of harm.