Step-Ball-Change: A Novel Read online

  “My parents will be throwing us a party,” Trey said.

  I was trying to remember what he did, exactly. I knew that he worked in a bank, and that he was unnaturally high up in the bank for his age, but that it didn’t exactly count since his family owned the bank. Still, he seemed perfectly bright, like someone who certainly could have made it on his own if the circumstances of his life had called for it. Or maybe it was just the way he looked at you when you spoke, as if you were exactly the person he was hoping to see and he just couldn’t believe how fascinating you were. It must have been a trick they taught in boarding school.

  “Well, we should go,” Kay said.

  “You’ve only been here a minute,” Tom said, but it didn’t sound like he was trying to talk them into staying.

  “You were asleep when we got here. You must be tired. It is awfully late.”

  “And you’ve got a meeting with Markus Jones in the morning,” Tom said, sounding more lawyerly than fatherly. “You’ve got to prep him for trial.”

  Kay sighed in a happy Doris Day manner and pressed her cheek into Trey’s shoulder. “I may not even go to work tomorrow. I may just stay in bed and look at bridal magazines all day.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Jones will be glad to explain that to the judge.”

  “Oh, stop it, Dad. You know better than anyone that they only show up for prep one time in ten.” She kissed us both. She seemed to sway to some private music playing in her head. When she turned away from me, I half expected Trey to spin her around and for the two of them to waltz out into the night, the engagement ring and Trey’s white teeth lighting the path before them. “Good night,” they sang. More kisses, tender waves. I wondered if this was what it felt like to find out your daughter had joined a cult. The cult of the brides. Tom and I stood at the door and stared even after they had driven away.

  “Let me get this straight. They get to pick the church and the club?” Tom said.

  “It’s looking that way.”

  “But you told me—I remember this distinctly—you said the daughter’s family got to choose. When Henry and Charlie got married and we had absolutely no say in anything, you said it would be different when Kay got married.”

  “Well, maybe it’s like this: The bride gets to pick and Kay is probably going to pick everything they want her to pick.”

  “But that’s not right,” Tom said. “That’s not Kay. Kay doesn’t give in on anything.”

  “Did you look at that girl? They say your IQ goes down twenty points when you fall in love. I think they take off an extra fifty points when you land South Africa’s largest diamond.”

  “And what’s with that ring?”

  “His mother probably has boxes of them lying around.”

  “Well, she can’t wear it to the office. Not unless he’s hiring a bodyguard to go with it.” Tom’s mood was going south. I could see the muscles working in his jaw.

  “What’s wrong with us?” I said. “What parents wouldn’t be thrilled to see their daughter marry Trey Bennett? She’s going to be rich and hugely adored for the rest of her life. That is not such a bad thing.”

  “If Kay wanted to be rich, she could have made her own money, she could have signed on to any corporate law firm in the country and been the queen of all billable hours. But she didn’t. She wanted to be a public defender because she knew that there were things that were more important than money.” Tom was climbing up on the soapbox of social injustice.

  “Things like pleasing your father.” This was not the smartest thing I could have said. Now Tom’s eyebrows were down, and once his eyebrows went down in combination with his jaw working, there was really no talking to him.

  “She took that job because she wanted it. Nobody does work like that to make someone else happy.”

  “I know Kay loves her job and I know she’s a good person.”

  Tom shook his head. “I’m just tired,” he said.

  We went off to bed in a state of sensory overload. All I had wanted was to go to sleep, but once we were lying together in the dark we found ourselves staring at the ceiling.

  “When we had Henry,” Tom whispered, “I remember looking at him in the hospital, this little baby parked in there with all the other little babies, and I thought, What have you gotten yourself into? I thought, For the next eighteen years this person is going to be your responsibility.”

  I laughed. “I thought the same thing. I thought, One day this baby is going to grow up and leave and I’m going to miss him so much.”

  “I just kept revising the figure—after college, after law school.”

  “After he gets married.”

  “But it never stops.” Tom turned over on his side and I slid into the warm place he had made for me with the curve of his body. He put his arm over my shoulder and pulled me in. “As soon as we get the house fixed,” he whispered.

  “You’ll retire.”

  “And you’ll hire a couple of extra teachers.”

  “And we’ll travel.”

  “Just the two of us.” It was our bedtime story, and I closed my eyes and saw Tom and me standing on the edge of the Mediterranean, the waves crashing on the rocks in front of us, the hills of Tuscany rising behind us. There wasn’t a phone anywhere for miles.

  chapter three

  TOM WAS GONE BY THE TIME I WOKE UP. AFTER FORTY-TWO years of marriage we had figured out how to be quiet in the morning. I pulled on some sweatpants and a T-shirt and went to see if I could catch him before he left, but the only person home was Woodrow, our contractor, sitting at the kitchen table with a bagel and a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper. I was thrilled to see him. When Woodrow took on our Florida room, he had no idea what he was getting into. He had scheduled other jobs and so for days at a time he would be gone. I had come to believe the house was going to cave in under my feet whenever he was gone. My peculiar sense of logic had convinced me that as long as Woodrow and his crew were working, the foundation would not collapse.

  Woodrow was about my age. We had both grown up in Raleigh. We had lived not more than ten miles away from each other for most of our lives, but we hadn’t met until we had both passed sixty and he came to work on our house. That can happen sometimes, especially when one person is white and the other is black. The years go by and you just keep missing each other. Tom had defended Woodrow’s nephew once, a good boy who did well in school but bore an unfortunate resemblance to another kid who knocked over Exxon stations for a living. After the case was over, Tom and Woodrow got to talking about the sunporch we had one day hoped to add on to the back of the house. Woodrow was feeling sufficiently grateful to Tom and said he thought he could do it for a very reasonable price. Except we only had slightly less than half a room. Every now and then he would have his men do a little work on it just so we could feel it might actually happen one day. The rest of the time was devoted to the foundation. That is, when they were there at all.

  “Hey there,” Woodrow said, looking up from the paper, my reading glasses sitting on the end of his nose. “I picked up bagels but Tom didn’t want one.”

  “Is he gone?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and refilled Woodrow’s cup. I sat down at the table and Woodrow folded up the front page and pushed it over to me, but I just shook my head and pushed it back.

  “I don’t care what’s going on in the world.”

  “Tom told me Kay was marrying a Bennett.”

  “How did he seem to be taking it this morning?”

  “I’ve seen him in better moods.”

  “It was a pretty big surprise.”

  “If one of my girls had ever come home with a millionaire, I think I would have found something nice to say about it.” Woodrow ripped off a chunk of bagel and soaked the edge of it in coffee.

  “Not if you didn’t like the guy.”

  “Tom says you all like him well enough.”

  I shook my head. I was ashamed of myself. “You’re
right, we do. I keep forgetting that. Don’t you want some cream cheese?”

  “They didn’t put any in the bag.”

  I got up and went to the refrigerator and found the cream cheese, and then I got myself a plate and a knife.

  “Kay’s a smart girl,” Woodrow said, handing me the bag of bagels. “She’s going to do what’s right. You don’t have to worry about her.”

  “Like you don’t worry about your girls.”

  “When you’ve got four girls, you learn to spread your worrying out evenly among them. It’s better that way, keeps you from getting too focused on any one thing. The biggest mistakes I’ve made as a parent came when I started putting all my worry on one of them. Get your mind off of Kay for a while. Try worrying about one of your other kids.”

  As if on cue, the only other child who was still around for me to worry about made his entrance. George came down the hall from his room looking sleepy, his pale hair kicking up in half a dozen directions. More so than with any of my other children, I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that George had grown up. He was the baby of the family and I guess I thought that meant he would stay that way. It was a huge surprise when we found out George was coming, five years after Tom and I had closed up shop on having children. I still felt guilty to think how much I did not want another baby, but, of course, there was no way of knowing then that the baby would be George. He was the best of Tom and the best of me, which made him a much better person than either of us.

  “Morning, Mother. Morning, Woodrow.” He stopped, put his forehead against the refrigerator, and closed his eyes for a minute.

  “Late night?” Woodrow said.

  “A very late night,” George said, his eyes still closed.

  “Were you studying?” I asked him.

  “Do I ever do anything else?” George yawned.

  “You’re like my daughter Erica. I had no idea a person could study that much.”

  “I hope she’s not in law school. I can’t take any more competition.”

  “Erica’s in nursing school,” Woodrow said.

  “Maybe I’ll chase an ambulance to her hospital someday.”

  “Woodrow brought bagels,” I said.

  George blinked. “That might help.” He swung by the coffeemaker and then padded to the table with his cup full.

  “So you missed all the excitement,” Woodrow said.

  “Don’t tell me.” George rifled through the bag to find a salt bagel. “You found termites. No, better than termites. The house is built on ancient Indian burial grounds and has to be moved to Durham. Except it can’t be moved because now the place is possessed.”

  “No, it’s still just the foundation,” Woodrow said.

  “Kay is marrying Trey Bennett.”

  George sat the bagel on top of his coffee cup. He looked like I had just told him a very funny joke. “Bennett as in the Bennett library and the Bennett outpatient surgical wing and the Bennett watercooler in junior high?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Woodrow pushed my glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked at the two of us sternly. “You people could stand to muster up a little enthusiasm here. For one thing, you might need to have a rich son-in-law to help you pay for all the work I’m doing on your house.”

  “The Bennett Foundation foundation,” George said. “They could sponsor a charity ball where everyone wore hard hats and black tie.” He took a bite of bagel and chewed it thoughtfully. “Or a foundation fox hunt. I hear that old Sport Bennett loves a good fox hunt.”

  “Except you can never get the little hard hats to stay on the foxes,” I said.

  “Glue,” George said. George was such a pragmatist.

  Woodrow pushed up from the table. “Okay, that’s enough. You people have problems. I’m going to get to work.” No sooner had he said the words than we heard his crew pull up in the driveway.

  “But there’s another piece of news,” I said, suddenly remembering it myself. “My sister is coming.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” Woodrow said.

  “A younger, prettier sister,” I said.

  “Aunt Taffy is coming?”

  “There isn’t any chance you’ll be finished by this afternoon, is there? I’d love to get the place cleaned up.” I said it as a joke and Woodrow stood by the door and laughed. I’ve always had a weakness for people who got my jokes.

  “I didn’t make your problems, that’s what you’ve got to remember. I’m only here to fix them.”

  “Thanks for the breakfast,” George said, and waved before Woodrow closed the door. “It’s a shame Kay isn’t marrying Woodrow so that we could keep him in the family.”

  “Woodrow is thirty years older than your sister, and besides, I don’t think he’s ever going to leave.”

  “So which piece of news is more alarming, that Kay is going to be Mrs. Bennett or that Aunt Taffy is coming to see us?”

  “It’s a toss-up.”

  George took a long sip of coffee and then stared into his cup for a while, trying to come up with a true likeness of himself. “I wonder if Kay plans to stop sleeping with Jack now that she’s engaged or if she’s going to wait until after she gets married to do that.”

  I thought I must have misunderstood him, though I couldn’t identify which part of the sentence could be thought of as unclear.

  “Oh, come on,” George said. “Stop it with the shocked-mother face. You knew that.”

  “Jack the D.A.?”

  “I think he has another last name, but yes, Jack the D.A.”

  “Kay’s been seeing Jack?”

  “Seeing all of Jack.”

  I looked around my kitchen. There were cans of plaster stacked up in rows. There were buckets and drop cloths and rollers. Outside the window there were four men sitting on my patio furniture looking at old architectural plans of our house. It didn’t look like anyplace I knew.

  “I always thought she liked Jack.”

  “She likes him,” George said.

  “I have no idea what’s going on anymore.”

  “I guess even Kay has a private life.”

  I shrugged. None of this made sense to me. “I should get ready for work.”

  “It isn’t a big deal, whatever it is with Jack. Maybe I’m completely wrong about it.”

  “You’re not wrong.”

  “Okay, I’m not wrong, but I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset,” I said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “But I should get to work, and then I have to come home and get things cleaned up, not that this place cleans up very well. I don’t want Taffy sneezing the whole time she’s here.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me about that, too,” George said.

  “I think after tonight you’ll know as much about it as I do.”

  I TRIED TO sort it all out on the way to the dance studio. I wasn’t upset about Jack, not in the sense that I was upset about Kay sleeping with Jack. Kay was thirty years old. I knew she wasn’t a virgin. What I was upset about were all of the things I hadn’t known: I hadn’t known that she had any interest in marrying Trey Bennett; I hadn’t known about Jack the D.A. Jack Carroll, that was his name. I felt like I must have been doing a pretty poor job as a mother if Kay didn’t feel like she could talk to me about these things. Then again, maybe when your daughter was thirty, she didn’t really need a mother to confide in anymore, and the thought of that depressed me, too.

  When we had Henry and then Charlie, I felt like I was just trying to figure out how to keep them alive: food, shelter, avoiding major head injuries. But by the time Kay came along, I was much better at the job. I was more relaxed. I was the kind of mother I wanted to be, the one you could talk to. And now I was finding out that when it came to the really big stuff, she hadn’t been talking at all.

  When I walked into the dance studio, my mind still going in a dozen different directions, a five-year-old girl name
d Poppy attached herself to my leg.

  “I lost a tooth,” Poppy said.

  I squatted down on the floor in front of her. Such a gorgeous child, black haired and freckled. “Where did you lose it?”

  “Right in my hand,” she said, and she opened the little drawstring bag she wore around her neck and produced the missing tooth, a tiny chunk of ivory.

  “How could it be lost?” I said, touching the tip of my finger to the tiny incisor. “It’s right here.”

  Poppy looked at the tooth and then looked at me, puzzled. “I lost it out of my head,” she said finally.

  And I thought, The world is still full of little girls who want to talk to me, so things can’t be too bad. Some days they rushed out into the parking lot and clustered around my car while I unfastened my seat belt. Their sentences began long before I had the door open. “Mrs. McSwan,” they would say, “look at my new tights, my new shoes. Look, Mrs. McSwan, I cut my hair. I can do the splits today.” And down they would go, legs splayed across the dirty asphalt. I leaned over and hoisted Katie Chundra back up to her feet and she beamed at the touch. They wanted nothing more than my attention, the opportunity to confide in me, to stand beside me in front of the mirror. They raised their hands to speak even when class wasn’t in session. They waved them back and forth like flags of unconditional surrender. Every minute I was there I heard my name spoken with burning urgency, “Mrs. McSwan! Mrs. McSwan!”

  Or, I should say, I heard some version of my name. I had given up trying to explain that my name was actually McSwain a long time ago. They were too young for puns anyway, and the idea that they could be attending a school based on a spelling error would have been deeply upsetting to them.

  I clapped my hands and they came running, the whole room filled with the slap of tiny feet wrapped in soft pink leather.

  Tom was going to be sixty-five in March and he planned to eat a piece of birthday cake and hand in his resignation. He was going to walk away from the public defender’s office the day his first pension check was ready, and while we traveled through Italy he would read all those big Russian novels that he had been lugging around since college. But me, I wanted to be buried at McSwan’s. I wanted to be one of those ancient ballet instructors who shouted for relevés from her wheelchair, who tapped time out on the floor with her cane. I knew why the Rolling Stones kept going on tour long past the age when it was appropriate to be a rock star. It wasn’t about the money. It was the love. Once you get used to the adoration and love of a room full of people, even if it’s a small room with very small people, well, there is no giving it up.